Runner beans

Apart from the beautiful and sunny weather (which means shorts and t-shirts) with long, golden light evenings well into 10pm, another thing to look forward to during the summer time is runner beans. I think we are very fortunate that at the age of 80, Steve's dad still religiously tended his garden back in early Spring and now all his hard work is paying off. This evening, I came home from work at the uni and because I didn't have my evening shift at M&S, I went out to the garden with a basket and started picking runner beans for dinner tonight. Nothing beats the feeling of being able to pick your dinner from your garden. I know it all sounds very cliche, but honestly as I was going round picking all the runner beans that were ready, I had this sense of pride and joy (eventhough I didn't really plant them, hehe)



This picture shows the runner beans still on the vine wrapped round the structure that Steve's dad built with bamboo. There are two of these structures in the garden with runnerbean vines, one put later than the other so that they don't all come up too much at the same time.

While making my way back to the house, I noticed sadly that this year we didn't get any rasberry at all from the bush. I was so looking forward to having loads and loads of rasberries like last year to make jam with but for some mysteriously unknown reason, the rasberry bush grew but did not bear a single fruit.



So as you can see, the bush just looks sad and unhealthy!! It's really puzzling because others have had their rasberry harvest and are continuously doing so and ours is just leaves with no berries.

Anyway I took my 'harvest' of runner beans into the kitchen and I also found a courgette which went into the basket as well, although not to be eaten together.



Before boiling the runner beans they have to be stringed and oddly there was something therapeutic about stringing the runner beans and I just couldn't get enough of stringing them. It took me no time at all and I had the whole basket of runner beans stringed and ready for boiling. Mind you, there weren't much to pick tonight because we normally get a lot more than that.



So there you go, one of the joys of summer, runner beans and they taste absolutely d-d-d-deeelicious !!