Beans & Grapes

Between us, we put in another four hours in the garden. It's a bit labor intensive right now! I finished loading up one bed, then planted it with 32 square feet of pinto beans and 64 square feet of soy beans. D. loaded up the other bed, then sulfured all the beds that hadn't yet been sulfured (in order to bring down the pH). I also got cups planted with pepper seeds (bell and jalapeño peppers) to make some starts. The tomatoes and peppers are now all seeded.

Many of the berries are growing very small leaves. We also figured out what the mystery berry is; it's actually a Concord grape that I bought on a whim at Walmart. It's supposed to be a little too hot for Concords but, well, there it was and we'll have a little experiment. There are other purple table grapes that do better in the heat, but how does one find out how they taste?? We used to make our own grape juice. In Oregon we could get Concord grapes for $0.50/pound, making homemade grape juice pretty inexpensive. Here I'm sure we'll never find a price like that, especially as they have to brought in from several hundred miles away and they don't travel well at all (most have a thin skin). The native grapes - muscadines - make terrible-tasting grape juice. Steam-juiced, it tastes like artichoke water, and cold-pressed it tastes like guava juice. Nothing wrong with guava juice, but it's just not the grape juice taste I want!