The Cook wrote:
songbird wrote:
....
for sweet peppers next year we'd like to grow
some of the red peppers for a change of pace.

have you grown the red kind of jalapenos?

Jalapenos are like bell peppers, leave them on the plant and they turn
red.

ah, ok, i did see a package of seeds for
them and they were red instead of green
so i was wondering if they were a different
variety or not. the sweet green peppers
we grow do not turn red when they get
older, they turn dark brown and they taste
rather icky too.

however, getting back to bean lore. i've
forgotten a few things and will likely remember
a few other things as time goes on.

soybeans have a lot of dust and small
hairs. some varieties seem to be hairier
than others.

when the beans ripen in the pods for some
of them the pods may get damaged or splotched
with fungi, chewed on by bugs/rodents, etc.
the correlation between the condition of
the pod and the condition of the dry beans
inside is not very high unless the pod has
actually been punctured.

there were many times when picking where i'd
miss a pod and only come back and find it
dragging in the dirt or otherwise splotched
and full of fungi on the outside. get the
pod open and find out the beans were perfectly
fine.

that is yet another reason why i think
organic methods are just fine. if i wanted
less splotchy pods i could stake the plants
to get more pods off the ground or out of
the close growing plant vines that some
varieties have. and yes that would actually
help for some of the harvesting and i'd have
perhaps a better result, but the thought of
dealing with even more staking and working
around the stakes is not high on my list
of good things to do. so i accept that i
might lose a handful of beans here or there
to fungal damage or more rodent damage from
them being on the ground and call it good.

sometimes i'd open a pod and find one bean
damaged or growing fungi and the rest of the
beans in the pod would be fine. other times
it was a loss of the whole pod to fungi. i
kept all those beans apart from the rest in
the buckets and now i have an entire bucket
of layered shells, fungi beans, other odd
beans i didn't want to eat and worm castings
(as a source of other fungi spores, bacteria
and the rest of the soil critters). they'll
not have worms put in there because i'm out
of covers for buckets and don't want to make
any more (as that would encourage me to keep
even more buckets of worms for the worm farm
and i'm short on space right now sooo... ).

other sorts of damage and oddities were
tiny dark spots (like the start of a fungal
growth or perhaps where a bug was inside
eating outwards). those went into the bucket
to be worm food too. some beans were split
like they had grown and then stopped growing
while the skin on the bean formed and then
we had a rain or something and they grew more
and split out of the skin. others had a
crackled or rough texture on the bean. i'm
sure they are edible so i didn't pick all of
them out. and then there are the times when
i'd accidentally toss a good bean away or
flick it with a shell and it'd land by a
good bounce in the wrong bucket. i wasn't
going to sort those back out again. worm food
they are.

and some beans are not all the way done or
they are aborted (hot weather i'm sure played
a big part in this last season). end up being
little specks of bean. and then some are just
very tiny beans and i don't want a lot of odd
sizes when cooking them. i could get different
sizes of mesh and screen them, but i've not
gotten to that stage yet. if i start selling
or handling more than a few lbs here or there
i'm probably going to have grade them.

other fun stuff, designing a bean shelling
"machine" in my head as i work on different
things. i figure i could protype it with
cardboard to get the shape and airflow figured
out and then when that is working i could
cover that with fiberglass. for air flow
there are plenty of energy efficient house
fans that would do the trick. to regulate
how much air isn't tough using a slide with
slots or holes. for crushing the beans
out of the shells before putting them in
the machine it is probably much easier to
do it with the pillowcase stomp method for
the harder beans. softer beans would need
a gentler kind of threshing setup. that
would be harder to do with simple stuff like
cardboard, but perhaps messing with some old
bike parts i could rig something up for not
too much $. all told a fun project if i can
get to it someday. then there is the dust
that comes out that you have to be very
careful with. the stuff can build up static
and/or explode if sparked. so either you
have to do it outside where there is enough
airflow to take care of the dust or you have to
filter the air and clean the filters in between
batches of beans.

in comparison the real easy method does look
more appealing on the costs involved. crush
the pods in the pillow case by walking on them
(it's a fun dance . then use the tossing in
the air when there is enough of a breeze to
blow the empty shells and chaff away. the
downside is that you don't get all the beans out
of the pods and you lose the pods and chaff to
the wind and so don't retain that material for
feeding to the worms or you can try to capture
them, but then that adds a little more work
collecting them again. this is a fairly quick
method too when the conditions are right. i think
i could have processed the whole harvest this way
and spent much less time shelling. but then i
would have been out of my therapy sessions.

next season i'll likely be doing this second
method as the design and building of a boxy machine
with the ducts and cardboard would need space
that we don't have. sheets and pillow cases i
already got. still it is nice to daydream
sometimes. like what i'm doing about a model
railroad to sort the beans by color and grade them
for me. that would be a lot of fun too. i do
miss my railroad.

in my even more funnier moments i dream about
having mice and chipmunks working for me collecting
the beans right from the plants. after finding a
few piles of peas and beans in odd places. too
bad both of them can carry diseases you don't want
in contact with things you might later be eating.
for a fully manual labor situation though having
natural critters doing some of the work could be a
good thing if you can find the right kind of
critter. worms are certainly the perfect critter
for helping take care of the empty shells and dust.

and then i can wander off those tracks and start
daydreaming about crossbreeding and what characteristics
i'd try for... one thing i think soybeans are so
popular for is because they are almost round and so it
makes processing them much easier. what doesn't roll
is discarded as it is likely defective, rotten or too
small.

ok, it is more fun to think about how to make a
green model railroad for beans. like a big tower
to store the beans in that could act as an electricity
generator too. hahaha. bean power... well, past
the bedtime, but it has been fun wandering around
the noodle tonight.


songbird