A glut of green beans

My message in vegetable gardening programs is to plant what you like to eat, just enough for what you want to eat and preserve (whether freezing, canning, etc.) and not anything more.

Small vegetable gardening spaces have kept me honest in this regard; even when I had more space, various critters and soil pests combined to make things manageable.

But this year, for some reason, my pole beans on trellises have been pest-free, and have kept producing for weeks and weeks... how many green beans can the two of us eat? 

I've frozen them plain, cooked them with garlic and onions, frozen those, too, made a delicious green bean, mint, and peanut salad (thanks to Yotam Ottolenghi's wonderful recipe), cooked more beans with mushrooms (and frozen those), etc. etc.  Needless to say, eating out this evening, neither of us picked green beens as our side!

And the beans that I've grown are quite delicious (Romano, Emerite, Kentucky Wonder, and a couple of others), so I'm thankful for the abundance, really, as I cooked up yet another batch this evening, after dinner out....

Green beans in late July...hmm, they still look like that, even after the squash succumbed to powdery mildew!