Speedy green beans

Who would have thought growing beans could be turned into a sport, but this week I've discovered the pleasures of bean racing. Perhaps it's not as noisy or as fast as the Indy 500, nor as gruelling and sweaty as an Olympic marathon, but at least bean racing is an honest competition, free of doping scandals – and the winner gets to make babies!

These are not my racing beans, but these climbing beans have inspired me to try growing smaller, dwarf beans, and they're my racing beans. I'll show you them in a moment. However, I have become very fond of humble bean flowers and the way the beans themselves form on plants, so I thought I'd start with a pretty photo of yet another baby bean coming into this world.

This is where the baby beans are coming from, my tower of climbing beans, but it has proved to be only a partial success. Yes, we're getting quite a good crop of 'Blue Lake' beans off these plants, but the (hidden) cutesy willow wigwam underneath all the leaves is at least one foot too short for the plants, and I suspect it's actually two feet too short. So there's a colossal snarl of climbing bean shoots at the top clinging to each other in a fairly sad and desperate manner. So I thought I'd also try growing some dwarf beans in a pot as well this summer and see how they go. They might suit my tiny garden better. And that's when I discovered bean racing.

I had a spare pot about 35cm high and wide, so I popped in three dwarf bush bean seeds and waited to see which one would do best. After a week of waiting, this is what I saw last Saturday, December 13. The rear bean streaking away, the left bean barely awake, and the right bean nowhere to be seen.

By Sunday, the right bean has finally made an appearance, but it seems too far behind already. The back bean is in front but lefty is catching up.

By Monday the right bean is nigh-on out of the running, but there's a chance that left bean could either do something spectacular and catch up with back bean, or a snail, cat, cockatoo or some other third party representing the Wild Kingdom could intervene in an untimely yet fateful way and nobble back bean's early lead.

Fast forward to Thursday and it's still a contest. Beans grow fast, don't they?

Saturday morning, December 20, Bean Finishing Line Day. I felt like awarding the prize to left bean purely because of the way it tirelessly made a contest of things all week (Aussies always support the underdog in any contest). But back bean was bigger and faster, and so...

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our winner, clearly the strongest of the three beans and hopefully also the best cropper, too. Time will tell.

I'm not sure whether the dwarf bean will be as attractive a plant as the climber, but I presume it will produce some equally fascinating flowers. These climbing bean flowers are perhaps not quite as pretty as the white flowers tinted with black streaks which you find on broad bean plants, but they're well worth admiring up close all the same.

These 'Blue Lake' beans have a lovely bean flavour, and they're especially nice to eat straight off the bush as a crisp, free-range gardener's snack. I like eating beans simply, just lightly steamed, but there is one way that I do cook them occasionally that comes from the Middle East. This recipe is from a book called "The Complete Middle East Cookbook" by Tess Mallos, a Sydney food writer. It's one of my kitchen bibles, with recipes from Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and all the way across to Afghanistan. This dish is a standard part of Lebanese restaurant menus here in Sydney, and its name of 'Lubyi bi Zayt', translated that means 'Green Beans in Oil'.

Green Beans in Oil

500g green beans

1/4 cup olive oil

1 medium-sized onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 cup chopped, peeled tomatoes

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1/2 cup water

salt

freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon sugar

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1. Wash beans well. Top and tail and remove strings if present. Cut into 5cm lengths, or slit them lengthwise.

2. Heat the olive oil in a pan and add the onion. Fry gently until transparent, add garlic and cook a few seconds longer.

3. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, water, sugar and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes.

4. Add the prepared beans and parsley, cover and simmer for a further 15-20 minutes until beans are tender. Serve hot or lukewarm, but they are also very good chilled.

My tips: depending on the beans used, I sometimes cook them for longer than the recipe says – up to 30-40 minutes, until well done. And these beans really can be eaten cold, lukewarm, warm or hot, and they keep very well in tupperware for several days, too. And the amount of oil is correct. A quarter cup, and I always use the nicest quality extra virgin olive oil I can find. This is a great way to cope with a bumper crop of beans, or at least take advantage of any kind of green bean when they're fresh, cheap, plentiful and in season.

Hooray, wet day!

Rain on the tin roof, a beautiful sound. We're almost getting average amounts of rainfall this year, but such has been the effect of the drought that the sound of rain still sends a thrill through me every time I hear it, as if the drought is breaking anew each time. So this amateur photographer and gardener heads outside as soon as the rain eases off...

Canna lilies after a dip in the above-ground ocean.


Pig Pen, otherwise known as Gardenia radicans, on its one day of good clean fun...

But in no time the crispy white gardenia blooms turn to sludge. I like the blending here of the shining pure optimism of youth, and the seedy decay of partied-out old age.

Here's the finishing touch we've been waiting for with our successful two-year program of striking a frangipani from a large cutting and transplanting it this spring. The first flush of sweetly fragrant white blooms with the lemony centre is a happy occasion.

The sole survivor of last year's successful Coleus Corner operation has really got going in the last couple of weeks, piling on a lot of growth and an almost impossibly complex leaf pattern. Quiet achiever, this one.

And the last couple of days of rain has prompted a pot full of chervil seeds to do their thing.

The climbing 'Blue Lake' beans have begun to flower, and the first beanette has made an appearance. Vegies have such lovely, complex flowers, I'm very fond of them all.

Silver beet looks handsome at all times, and after a shower of rain I just feel like peeling off a leaf and munching on it there and then.

The Eureka lemon is flowering away now, setting fruit too. But I think I'll remove most of the fruit so it can get on with the business of growing a bit more as a tree.

I could swear this ladybird was going from one little patch of powdery mildew to another on this zucchini leaf. I watched it for a minute or two and it went from one whitish spot to the next. Either there's an extremely tiny bug in the fungus that I cannot see, or the fungus itself is delicious. After all, we eat mushrooms and truffles! My organic milk spray is preventing the powdery mildew taking over the other zucchini plants (and the rest of this plant, too) but it works mostly as an effective suppressor of mildew's spread, rather than eliminating it altogether when it occurs.

Already the sunshine has returned, but it was lovely watching the rain fall down, the sky crackle with lightning and low clouds boiling with their dark grey, ferocious energy. It's hard to begrudge the sun and the clear blue sky the next couple of days to themselves, either, as everything grows with such verve right now. But it will be a thrill once more to hear the hiss of rain on the old tin roof.

Morning ramble

November 1 started off cloudy yet warm, the perfect sort of weather for a little morning ramble, a pleasure I'd been denying myself for several days, due to that annoying malady known as work.

Here's Garden Amateur land this mild morning, with everything chugging along nicely. The two pots at the front left are potted cumquats which I've come to call 'The Twins'. One belongs to me, the other to my friend Michelle, who's living in Birdsville, a place where cumquats would not like to live. Michelle's blog mentioned that it got up to 42.8°C there the other day... gets hot in Birdsville, and it isn't even summer yet.

Meanwhile here in Sydney, the Blue Lake beans are casually twining their way up their little willow teepee. They shot out of the ground on 'being born' day, but since then their pace has been merely steady.

I like the way climbers and twiners go about their business. I keep on thinking of doing some time-lapse photography one of these days...

I must admit that I'm finding vegetables a lot more beautiful than I expected them to be. Perhaps it's their radiant good health that appeals, but I love all the details of how they grow, their foliage, their flowers, the forms they take. In the past I restricted myself to growing lots of salad greens, some tomatoes and herbs, but these last two years have seen me trying to grow all sorts of vegetables – and almost all of them have proven to be the most handsome plants. These beans are no exception.

Given that this is such a big, sprawling plant it's amazing that I haven't mentioned its presence in the 9m x 7.5m of my little backyard. It's cardamom, and it's one of the oldest plants that I have growing here. This is about 16-17 years old. I grow it mostly because it provides a good screen for the fence, actually, but its fragrant leaves are nice to be near. Alas, it produces no pods for me at all. Never has! An Indian-born friend, Rema, occasionally takes some cardamom leaves home and then wraps them around little milk-based sweets. She then steams the sweets in the leaves, and the heady cardamom scent goes through them. Delicious!

And while I'm talking culinary matters Indian, my good old curry tree is in bloom, and over the last few weeks since I posted about this plant it has leafed up beautifully. Such a lovely little potted tree, and so useful in the kitchen, too.

For the record, here's the leaves and the flowers of the curry tree this morning. The flowers are small clusters of stars which last a few weeks. Later on in late summer and autumn, berries appear.

Producing a good flush of leaves and flower buds everywhere, our baby frangipani, which we've grown from a cutting taken two years ago and transplanted in early spring, has settled in beautifully to its new, permanent home. The mulch is there to suppress weeds mostly. Frangipanis and Sydney were meant for each other. I'll never worry about watering or feeding it and it will thrive on my benign neglect. Raising it as a baby was all the help it needed from me, and all I need to do now is leave it alone!

Leave it alone I have promised to do, but I still have visiting rights. Here's a flower stalk rising from one of the frangipani branches. Can't wait to enjoy that scent again!

Another backyard baby is this only child, the sole Jalapeno chilli, and the only chilli in fact, that I have growing here this year. I use some chillies in cooking, but not a lot, so one plant is all I really need (given that they are so plentiful in our local Asian shops). I like the Jalapeno because it's mild, rating about 5 on the 10 point heat scale. In previous years I have grown habaneros, serranos, jalapenos, anchos, cayennes and several others, mostly because I love the look of the plants when they're laden with fruit (especially the pretty apricot-coloured habaneros). This year I've scaled back on the chillies to make way for the other vegie crops.

Speaking of making way for space reasons, the potato patch is turning into the real-estate takeover merchant of my backyard. Sprawling everywhere, lush and green, happy and flowering, spuds take on a suburban sprawl like no other.

The packet for these Roma (egg) tomatoes says they're ideal for pots. Every book I have says Romas need staking. We shall see. They have stout stems and do seem to be a bit squat in growth habit so far, but I do have some spare stakes at the ready, just in case.

This gaggle of pots have made their way onto the main path up the middle of the backyard, where the sun is good. The chives in the foreground aren't that flash, as they were a victim of the spreading potato metropolis. As I had been busy with work lately I'd forgotten about the pot of chives around the side. I found them almost completely covered by spud leaves. They'll bounce back. The little pot at the back left is rocket, mixed lettuce on the right, basil in the centre at the back. All happy as can be.

The zucchinis are happy plants, too, their big starry yellow flowers yelling "over here" to all potential harvesters. There are three plants here, and in the previous week we harvested about 6-10 baby zucchinis with their flowers, then cooked them up after stuffing the flowers with a mix of ricotta, goat's cheese and herbs.

Tonight, I'm cooking these guys. The variety is 'Black Beauty', by the way, and it seems to be cropping a little bit better than the 'Blackjack' which I grew last year. I've deliberately harvested these when much smaller than the usual size of zucchini sold in shops, as I think that in general, zucchinis taste better as quite small vegies.

And speaking of cooking zucchinis, that's what I had better get busy doing right now – preparing some lazy, simple food. Roast a chicken, with baked potatoes and baked cauliflower florets (ever tried caulis baked? – heaven, they become sweet, completely different from steamed or boiled caulis) plus the zucchini babies. I might even bake them, too...

Bouncing baby beans

Sow some bean seeds and it's not hard to see where the story of Jack and the Beanstalk came from. From just barely breaking the soil at 7 in the morning, my bean shoots were two inches high by mid-afternoon.

Here's where the beans will be climbing. I've sown 'Blue Lake' climber beans around the base of this cute obelisk of willow.

7am Monday morning, and the first bean shoot breaks through the soil.

3pm Monday and it's off and racing skywards. I'm not all that keen for it to poke through the clouds and find sleeping giants. Just a nice crop of tender green beans in summer will do me fine.

The seed packet said to space them about 15cm apart, so that's what I've done.

Wednesday morning and they're all up. The little greeny-blue blobs on the ground are snail pellets. We got about 10mm of rain yesterday and I knew snails and slugs would head straight for these beans that night, so I spread around a few pellets. This morning I found five dead snails and three dead slugs all around the baby bean shoots. One bean shoot was munched to the ground but all the rest survived. The snail pellets are a new type based on iron, and the makers say they aren't poisonous to native lizards or birds, or to pets. At least they work just as well as the dodgy old super-poisonous pellets.

And so, for this bean-growing newbie, everything is off to a good start and growing quite nicely. The spectacular growth of the beans is great fun to witness. I'm becoming increasingly addicted to growing everything from seed. Not only is it much cheaper, but seed sprouting is more fun to see happening – it's just so much closer to nature. Besides, through the various seed catalogues you have access to a huge array of different vegie varieties, so it's just more interesting all-round. Sure, 'Blue Lake' beans are hardly a rarity, but everyone seems to say they have really outstanding flavour, and that's why I am growing all my own vegies and herbs – for the fresh, home-grown flavour.