Thom Bri

Worst was the squash. It was all destroyed by bugs.

Good that you got a decent product!

I don't worry much about composting. It all gets piled up willy nilly wherever there is an open spot. In the fall I dig a pit and push it all in. Wood, leaves, kitchen scraps. Everything. Then just bury it. A year later in the next fall it all gets dug up again and everything except the hardest wood is mostly decomposed. The pit is filled again for the next year. With all the fall leaves I have to dig several pits, so basically that whole garden gets turned over every year or two at most.

Another new bean. These appeared suddenly a year or 2 years ago. They appear to be a cross or mutation of the purple beans I have been growing forever. Pic shows fresh purple shell and when dried has no color. Original bean was tan.

Own the home and a typical suburban lot, big enough for a garden and a few fruit trees. We got married, worked 10 years living in a tiny apartment with 2 kids, to save the cash to buy the home outright.

My theory of money management is 'Don't pay the bank. Make the bank pay you.'

By that I mean don't buy on credit and pay interest. No mortgage. Invest the money, receive interest, until you can buy the thing you want for cash.

In addition I own 1/5 share of the family farm. With my siblings, after our folks passed away. This is fairly recent, and we are not sure what we will do with it, but for at least a year or two we are keeping it. It's small, and income from the land just barely pays insurance and taxes.

Squash was a total bust in the 3-sisters garden. I got one immature Kabocha and a couple zucchinis before the squash bugs eliminated them all. This pic is from a small non-organic garden nearby. Sad. Hope to try again next spring. I'd sure like some tips on how to grow squash without insecticides!

Any idea what kind of bean this is?
Various degrees of drying beans.

Shelling beans all week. It's slow work, but relaxing and I can sit and read at the same time.

About 3/4 are the tan, flat ones, with a mix of whatever else. The red, black, and white ones are standard supermarket beans, Kidney, Great Northern, and Black Beans. The brown ones and the black or brown speckled ones just showed up. Crosses of some sort I suppose.

Post corn harvest. Still lots of beans and tomatoes.

Beans climbing

Picking and shelling lots of beans the last few days. It's been a very good year for beans. Some years September is very wet and humid, and lots of beans rot in the pods. Not this year.

But I got to thinking about the logic of the 3 sisters. Beans don't need to climb to make lots of beans; they grow perfectly well running along the ground. But, beans growing along the ground tend to get damp and rot easily. So the purpose of growing climbing beans with corn isn't to give the beans a place to grow. It's to prevent losses before harvest. Plus, harvesting beans at head height is a lot easier than bending down and picking them off the ground.