Green beans and Potatoes
I grew some green beans last year on my dacha and I would recommend that if you have a garden and, like me, you're partial to a green bean or two, you try growing some too. It's very easy to do. You just poke them into the soil with your finger then watch them grow. They don't need much looking after. You hardly even need to water them. You also get a surprisingly large yield and you can harvest them once a week for a month or more.
I grew a kind called 'dwarf French beans'. They grow to about 30-40 centimetres and I planted a patch about 1 metre by 3 metres. Each time I took a harvest I got about a kilo of beans. I spoke to my friend Keith who is an expert organic gardener, and he says that there are lots of varieties of green beans, but they are all much the same in that they don't need much looking after and they will all usually provide a heavy crop. You can sow the beans from spring until mid summer and if you make two or three sowings over the season, you can pick beans all summer. Apparently the secret of a big harvest is to pick the bean pods while the beans inside are still small. That way the plants keep producing more pods. Now, this is very good news for the kitchen gardener, because green beans are at their best when young and tender, before the beans start to swell and the pods get all tough and stringy.
In case you should take my advice and thus have piles of crisp, sweet bean pods on your hands, here's a simple, quick and tasty way of dealing with them.
Ingredients
300-400g green beans
3 medium potatoes
1 green pepper
1 large tomato
4-5 cloves of garlic
A pinch of dried oregano
A pinch of black pepper
Salt
Olive oil for frying
Top and tail the beans and cut them into 5 cm pieces. Cut the potatoes into 2-3 cm cubes and chop up the onion, pepper and tomato any way you like.
Fry the onion and potato for 5 minutes, until the onion becomes transparent, then add all the other ingredients. Stir and cover the pan. After 5 minutes turn the heat down a little and simmer for another 5 or 10 minutes until the potatoes are soft, adding some water if the ingredients seem too dry. Easy, huh?