The Green Beans Have Begun

My attempts at growing green beans in the past few years have been something of an inside joke in this house.  The first year I grew pole beans out here I severely underestimated the size of the harvest that I would get.  I planted the beans along the two longest sides of the fence in the original garden.  Those summer evenings were spent picking green beans and slapping mosquitos.  During the peak weeks of the harvest I was picking at least a gallon bag (sometimes two) of green beans every night.  Picking was very time consuming.  Then the cleaning and freezing of them filled out the night.  Needless to say our freezer was filled in very short order with little more than green beans.  We still had many bags of frozen beans by the time we started harvesting them the following year.  In fact I think we still find bags of them here and there when we start digging through the freezer.  Last year we tried dehydrating them instead and that seems to be a pretty decent way to preserve them as well.  That way we didn't have the freezer burn problems that we ran into the previous year.  This year I think we will be dehydrating them again.  We still have plenty of dehydrated beans from last year, so I am glad that I didn't plant a ton of green beans again.  So far the harvests have been minimal and I have been adding them to dinner veggie mixes as we get them.  The harvests haven't been large enough yet for them to be a stand alone side dish for two.