But I digress. One day, this gentleman, who had heard of my interest in growing things (i.e., “She grubs around in the dirt; we can’t do a thing with her”), brought me some funny papery-looking black things which he explained were seeds produced from one of his amaryllis bulbs when a bunch of them had bloomed at the same time. He’d done a little bit of romancing the amaryllis (stamen to pistol) and one of the plants had formed a seed pod, matured seed and he had seed to share. No one had any idea what would happen, but I stuck them in a box of potting soil, kept them moist and covered and voila! Little amaryllis plants, which I gave away.

There is nothing to say that as far as flowering plants in your garden, that you can’t do the same. Perhaps you will come up with something new and interesting. Seedsman the world over (Thompson and Morgan being the most famous for this) encourage home gardening scientists to hybridize plants to see if they can come up with something new or different (Burpee has been looking for a white marigold for years using this method). Some of the easiest (in that the bees and other insects do most of your work for you; all you have to do is take notice of the seed pods and save them once they’ve dried out) to use this method with are plants such as day lillies, irises, and hostas. Of course, if you want to do things a bit more scientifically and in a more controlled way, you can select the two lillies, or two irises, or two hostas (you want to match plant type) that you want to marry, use the pollen from one on the pistol of the other and close off with a small paper bag so that wandering insects don’t introduce pollen you don’t want. Once they have created seed pods that mature and dry, you can remove the seeds and store them in a cool dry place or do what I did below.

Last summer, while wandering around the garden, I noticed all the maturing seed pods on my day lilies and gathered up the shiny black seeds. I literally just jabbed them into holes into a plastic box that I had some potting soil in, made them moist and covered them up and forgot about them in a shady corner of the greenhouse. When it got cold and I had to bring plants into the house from the greenhouse, nothing was going on, but I brought the box inside and left it on a table near a sunny window in the living room. And now we had little plants. Isn’t that exciting. There is nothing like seeing a seed come up. Pretty soon, I’m going to plant each plant into a pot of its own and this spring, I’ll put them out in the garden and we’ll see what we get. Nothing more exciting than that.

For more about hybridizing day lilies, go here
For more about hybridizing hostas, go here
For more about hybridizing irisgo here

(scientist graphic courtesy of dzingeek)

Slow down, Bucko. Let’s throw a little science on this, ok?

A couple of years ago, we grew tomatoes that we had dreams about. The descriptions in the catalogs were uniformly exquisite.

And then we got a cool, wet summer.

And late blight.

And tomatoes? Well, those fantasies stayed fantasies because we got no tomatoes. And we got no peppers either. Anything that needed ‘hot feet’ was just a dead loss.

So, this year, I decided to do this whole seed thing in a much more scientific way. If I had any sort of clue as to what sort of summer the long range forecasters thought we would have, I’d have a shot at beating the first frost with some red tomatoes and peppers that were not nubbins.

So, this year, I am consulting this site here: Long Range Forecasts

Which has these wonderful maps (Aunt Toby dotes on maps. Bar charts too, but that is a discussion for another time; I’d put one up but they are ‘all rights reserved’ but trust me on this one; they are great maps) which show me that, oh dear. We are not only going to have a cool summer early when I want it to be hot, we’re going to have a cool and DRY summer and then it will get hot later. So, on the one hand, I’ve got to take into account that I won’t have the sun and temperatures working for me in terms of things like tomatoes and peppers, but on the plus side, since it won’t be wet, the blight thing might not be as much of a factor.

What to do? What to do? And what if the long range forecasters are wrong? What if I do have a hot summer? How do I hedge my bets here?

Well, first of all, even the most cold hardy tomatoes and peppers, the ones with the shortest seasons, are not necessarily the worst choices for a hot summer. They will just develop and mature faster if it’s a hot summer, as long as I can provide steady sources of water. Which we can at Chez Siberia because we have TWO sumps which run most of the time all year round (yes, I know but I actually have two separate basements and my house is at the bottom of a hill). The DH has run hosing from the sump closest to the garden so we have steady water for the garden no matter what. And since we’d be running those sumps in any case (because otherwise, the basement would be 18” deep in water in about two hours if we did not), this is as good a use for the water as any.

So, I’ve got my water and I’m going to choose the shortest season, best tasting tomatoes and peppers (and if I was an eggplant person, I’d go for the shortest season, best tasting eggplants I could find too). So, what is out there that is a candidate?

Less than 60 days to first ripe tomatoes:
Early Girl
Early Wonder
Glacier
Kimberly(will set fruit well in cool temps)
Matina
Oregon Spring (nearly seedless)
Prairie Fire
Silvery Fir
Sileta
Stupice (From Czecholoslovakia – we grew this last year; great taste and productivity)

Sixty to 70 days to first ripe tomatoes
Applause (good for tighter growing spaces)
Better Bush
Bush Beefsteak
Fireworks
Grushovka – 65 days are you have canning tomatoes
Jetsetter
Legend (this one has strong resistance to late blight fungus)
New Big Dwarf (2’ plants make these great for container growing)
Red Rocket
506 Bush

We like to can a lot of pear tomatoes; our choices for this year will have to come from this list:
Super Marzano: 70 days
Victoria Supreme: 70 days

For sweet peppers:
Better Belle: 65 days
Biscayne: 65 days
Bounty: 65 days
Corno di toro: 68 days
Cubanelle PS: 65 days
Flexum: 65 days
Giant Marconi: 63 days
Gypsy: 60 days
Roumanian rainbow: 60 days (we grew these last year – they were wonderful)

Now, I love hot peppers but if we have a cool and/or wet summer, they don’t do well here, so I don’t bother.

So, there you go – use a little bit of science to modify what you put into the garden and you just might do better than you think.
(photo courtesy of AJ)

This year, I left two that I knew would work in the snow, kale and Brussels sprouts, and two experiments, chard and fennel. The experiments were a colossal failure: The fennel froze out completely and the chard rotted where the stems of the plant met the ground. Done.

But the kale and the sprouts are fine. The kale looks pretty ragged, I admit, but it’s still harvestable, cookable and edible. The sprouts look great; they were protected by the plants’ leaves, so they are looking fresh and green. Yum.

So, while you still have time to make out your seed order for 2011, consider trying out kale and sprouts for your garden this next spring. They are hardy (I put my seed into the ground late in March or early April under glass – you can use clean plastic over hoops too, if you have them; old windows over surplus timbers or cement blocks of you don’t) and actually very tasty. Something new to most families, for sure, but a definite way to extend the season for your garden.

To the topic at hand: seed catalogs.

With the advent and embracing of the internet by retail seed sellers, the whole convenient factor inherent with going to a site, ordering seeds and paying might seem to doom paper catalogs to the ‘ash heap of history’, but they really are quite useful. Seed houses are always looking for new/different/foreign/trendy plants and seeds. That’s in their DNA (so to speak) and certainly from a marketing standpoint, this is one of the major ways they differentiate themselves for the competition. If everyone sold the same varieties, there would be no need for there to be so many different retailers in the field. Even with specialization, you’d think there are only so many varieties of short season tomatoes, for example.

But the problem is that people are constantly discovering new and old varieties of flowers, fruits and veggies and sometimes, your particular fav might just go off the radar. And if all you have is your memory that you like a certain variety of green bean, and there’s been a crop failure or disease outbreak, you might just find, if you use the ‘go to the site and search on variety name’, that you are out of luck. And, conversely, old favorites which have gone out of commercial production may be resurrected, but if you haven’t found it in your searches for a while, you might think that it’s…just…not…available.

Enter, catalogs. This seemingly oldest of marketing forms has a definite place next to your easy chair or bedside table because (especially at this most dark and chilly time of the year), hope definitely ‘springs eternal’ with an application of well-written plant copy with a generous dusting of color photographs or drawings. Once you sit down to read all the entries on tomatoes or peppers, for example, you’ll discover that there are a whole lot of items that you never knew had come into commercial production just for people like you and me.

Example:
I have now read in several of my catalogs about a tomato from Argentina (!), which is being described as ‘sprayless’, virtually bugproof. For those of us who live in warmer/more humid climates where raising tomatoes is a constant battle with tomato hornworm and other critters, this is a tomato that should interest a lot of people. It’s called “Peron” (wouldn’t you know) and I can tell you that this is a completely new to the catalogs tomato. Last year? Not there. If I had not gotten catalogs to read, I never would have known about it. (Pine Tree Garden Seeds)

Prima Rose Swiss Chard (Totally Tomato) Now, those of you who visit here know that we love our Rainbow Chard at Chez Siberia (still have it out in the garden too), but this is completely different. Rainbow Chard is colorful with it’s red/orange/yellow/white/green ribs and veins in the leaves, but the leaves are still bright green. It’s darned decorative, but Prima Rose has it beat: Beet red in the stems AND the leaves. Very decorative stuff and could be a great ‘edible lanscaping’ candidate. I wouldn’t have known about this except that I get and read the catalog.

Purple Tionfo Violetto Beans (Pine Tree Garden Seeds): We’re big fans of purple bush beans for their earliness and ability to handle cool conditions, but we’ve never seen another purple bean. This is new, from Italy. It’s not a bush bean but is supposedly superior and very ornamental, so it might be worth putting up a trellis to have them. But again, I’d never have known about them if I had not gotten the catalog and sat down and read it.

Now is a great time to sit down with your catalogs; if you aren’t on any seed companies’ mailing lists (and I don’t know how you’ve escaped unless you have not ordered seeds recently), now is the time to visit some sites and order some catalogs so that you can get started with dreaming up your garden for the spring.

You might want to search on ‘seeds for xxx” (where ‘xxx’ stands for your region of the country) or, seeds for a particular type of flower or vegetable or a particular hardiness of vegetable (peppers for short season areas, etc.). Once you get on a mailing list and get your catalogs, it’s time to hunker down with your favorite hot beverage and give these ‘dream books’ a good read, with your marker in hand to circle varieties that look interesting or useful to you.

Bon appetite!!

That is the way it is with kale. Just eat it. Find a way to eat it that works for you, but eat it. The nutritional benefits of this vegetable are just so huge; if you can’t bring yourself to eat any other green veggie or leafy green, eat kale. (no, I am not on the payroll of the American Kale Conference or the National Kale Board or whatever lobbying group they have; as a matter of fact, that might be part of the problem. I don’t think anyone is actually doing PR for the vegetable)

OK. Housekeeping. What IS kale?
Kale is a member of the cabbage family (Brassica oleracea Acephala Group) and because it’s leaves do not form a head, it is considered to be closer to the ancestors of cabbage than any other member of the family.
In its current state of development (you can get flat and curly leafed varieties), this is a vegetable which has been around for thousands of years and is documented as being eaten by Romans in the 4th Century B.C.

Advantages of Kale
If you are a gardener in the northern part of the US, kale is something that you can start early, eat all summer, keep into the fall and even eat after it’s gotten a hard frost. As a matter of fact, the sugars in the plant actually are accentuated by frost, so this is an advantage in terms of having a fresh veggie out of the garden after everything else has seemingly been killed off. . . .

Kale freezes well. Kale will keep under the snow. I have dug up kale for dinners in January out of the snow. It is firm, green, crunchy and juicy. During the winter, when getting fresh veggies (except for those being trucked in from places like Florida, California and Texas) can be iffy, having kale out in the ‘deep freeze’ is definitely worth it.
Kale is dead easy to grow. All veggies in the cabbage family are just the easiest in that you do not have to worry about the temperature of the soil when you plant the seeds. As long as you can work the soil, you can plant kale. Kale seeds will come up between 45 and 50 degrees in the soil.

Benefits of Kale
Like all members of the cabbage family, kale is a powerhouse vegetable. It is an excellent source of Vitamin K, A, and C. It also is a great source of such minerals as copper, manganese, calcium and potassium. It is strong in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients such as Vitamin C, beta-carotene and manganese as well as 45 different “flavonoids”, including kaempferol and quercetin which show anti-inflammatory action.

Kale is very high in fiber (which we know none of us gets enough of, frankly) and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), which is the basic building block for all omega-3 fats.

Kale is an especially strong source of cancer-preventive nutrients called glucosinolates, which when the vegetable is eated and digested, convert into cancer preventing compounds in the body.
For more about kale and nutrition: kale

more kale

Adding kale to your diet
One of the issues in American dietary life is that we like our veggies dead bland. What is the most popular member of the cabbage family? Broccoli, which frankly has been selected over the past 50 years to be something people can pour cheese sauce over in order to get kids to eat it at all. If you want to walk on the wild side with broccoli, try broccoli raab (also referred to in Italian families as ‘raapi’), which is to broccoli, what hot Italian sausage is to a McDonald’s hamburger. THAT, my friends, is broccoli and is usually cooked with about 6 cloves of garlic.

No one is ever going to call kale a ‘shy vegetable’; it is strong no matter how you cook it (steaming is best, actually, but a bit of a sautee in a little olive oil will help with harnessing the Vit. B content). If you look at various European cuisines that use it, almost universally, you will see that kale is put in combination with other very strongly flavored ingredients:

Portugese Caldo Verde, a soup, combines kale with spicy sausages.
In Germany, the standard is to eat kale with mettwurst.

So, if you have a spicy stew or soup (like chili for example, now that we are coming into winter), adding several cups of washed, de-stemmed, chopped up kale leaves will give a tremendous nutritional boost and the kids won’t complain too much. We like to sautee kale with a little olive oil and onions, served with a little bit of slivered almonds or chopped walnuts.

Adding kale to your garden
It’s never too late!! I just ordered seeds for all sorts of greens, kale, chard, beets, etc. to have on hand for the early spring garden (soil temperatures in the 45 + range which is April here; depending on where you live, ‘your mileage may vary’). They arrived and I’ve got them in a ziplock™ bag in the back of the fridge to wait for their debut. It’s not really worth trying to start them inside since you can put them straight into the ground so early. The pictures of the kale here from my garden are of red Russian kale, which stands at this point almost 5 feet tall. If you want something smaller or with curly leaves, you might want to try dwarf Siberian kale or Tuscan black kale (which is actually not black but is a very dark blue green and is actually rather ornamental so if you’d like to move your landscaping toward more of an edible situation, this might be a great choice).

So, do just one thing: Add kale to ONE dinner this week. Does a body good™ and all that.

Done.

Nope.

Here at Chez Siberia, it ain’t over until…. Well, it ain’t over. We’ve still got broccoli, Brussels sprouts and kale in the garden which will hold. The kale will hold over the winter under the snow, so I will harvest anything higher than about 18” above the ground and once we start getting snow, I’ll make sure I cover it up. Then, I can go out and dig out fresh kale as long as it lasts. The other thing is that, really, for those of us for whom ‘sticking stuff into the ground’ is at least half the fun, right now is a great time. We’ve had the first killer frosts. The ground has started to cool down, so there are things we can put into the ground to over-winter until the spring.

So, today, we marched outside and planted garlic and multiplier onions which I had ordered from Territorial Seed. They always ship late like this, so it’s not as if I had garlic hanging around the house to dry out. There is nothing easier than garlic as long as you have a bed that has been dug over and soft. Just break the bulb into cloves, stick them in, flat side down, every 4” apart and literally forget about it until the spring. They will almost be the first green sticking up once the snow comes off the ground.

The other things I planted are more of an experiment. I’m with Thomas Jefferson in that I believe all gardening should be filled with experiments: growing new things, growing things that you’ve never grown before, trying things out, and trying things that should not work. Pushing the growing season envelop is almost something worth doing. You never know what will work.

I was looking at Territorial Seed’s catalog and they had a section for ‘cold season growing’. Now, Territorial is in Oregon, so their idea of the ‘cold season’ is when it rains more and drops below 60 degrees. But they had a couple of items that I thought, “What the heck – it’s just seed and if it works!!!”

So, I ordered Cascadia peas and Windsor beans. The beans are a type of fava and are rated hardy down to (wait for it…wait for it) 12 degrees F. Twelve degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m going to say that again: 12 degrees F.

Now, I’m not sure if they are saying that once the plants come UP, the plants are hardy down to 12 degrees F., but let’s face it, any plant that is hardy twenty degrees below freezing temperature should be able to handle frost in the ground. Right? Well, that’s the experiment.

I took the soil temperature – it’s down to 51.6 degrees F. We’re back to springtime soil temps now. I planted the peas and beans several inches down, patted down the soil, and then put 3 inches of aged composted stuff on top as mulch. I’m not sure what will happen – shoot, this is an experiment. The question really is this:

1. Will the beans and peas actually make it through the winter?
2. Will the beans and peas actually germinate and come up?
3. How will they do? Will they flower earlier? Will we get beans and peas really early in the spring? I saved seeds for both the peas and the beans and I’ll start them in the spring early and we’ll see if the fall-sown seed starts earlier, and gets us veggies earlier. Or if it’s just not worth it.

How do you deal with fall in your garden? If you’re from areas south of Virginia, you are probably able to grow a fall garden and get things started very early in the spring. But then again, if you are really far south, you may have to give up the ghost by the time May and the heatwave gets there. Do you think planting peas, beans, greens at this point is worth it for you?

And Aunt Toby is here today to tell you this: It’s worth it.

First – you KNOW what you have in your soil. You KNOW what you did or didn’t do. You don’t have any control over what was done to the field that the potatoes or onions in that 50 pound bag came in, how they were handled, how they were cleaned and washed, how they were stored, how clean the equipment was that put the potatoes or onions into those bags. What the warehouse or the delivery truck was like. None of that is under your control when you buy that bag in the grocery store.

But when you grow your own, however much you grow, everything is YOU. How much compost you put into the soil, how closely you planted the onion or potato sets, how much you weeded to get rid of competition, how much you watered (because you had a dry summer) or didn’t. When you dug them up. How you dug them up. How you cleaned them. How you store them. It’s all you. And if you want to make sure of as many bites that go into your mouth (and into the tummies of the rest of your family), growing your own is the best way to do that.

Second – the return on investment (or as our ‘friends’ on Wall Street call it, “ROI”) for veggies like onions and potatoes is huge. I’ll use this year’s onion crop as an example:

This spring, we planted about one pound of yellow onion sets (we use yellow Stuttgarter onions because those are hard, dense onions and store really well; red onions are great fresh but they do not store well), in a space 4 feet by 12 feet, with each set spaced 6 inches apart. We just dug them up yesterday (we actually could have dug them up earlier; the foliage had flopped down and died back but we had some rainy weather and you don’t want to dig up your onions when it’s all wet – they get slimy). That one pound (give or take a few ounces; I’m not exactly sure if it was just one pound or a pound and a half) of sets turned into onions which weighed about 35 pounds (again, give or take a pound either way because the scale I was using is not really exact). Depending on where you live, your best storage onion might be something different; what grows best in any particular area is highly ‘day length’ specific. In the northern half of the US, yellow Stuttgarter is the storage onion of choice. Also, please note: just jogging down to your local home/garden store might not be the best place to buy your onion sets. First: If it’s a large national chain, your local store will have the same onion sets that everyone else in the chain gets and this might not be best for your area, truly. Second, the quality of storage might not be the best. It might be better to go to the mail order outlets or the internet to find onion sets – many outlets have varieties that will not be available in your local store and they will be shipped to you when the time is right for planting in any case. Just a thought.

Again, let’s look at the numbers here:
Est. 1.5 pounds of sets
Payback: 35 pounds of onions
The only cost we had was for the sets, a little bit of weeding time (we mulch heavily so that keeps most of the weeds in check) and some watering time during the dry spell. We also were using a hose from one of our sumps which basically runs no matter how dry it gets so we did not have any extra cost for electricity from the pump. The amount of space was 48 square feet.

There are other vegetables that take more work, but I think onions are worth it. One note: Once you’ve harvested your onions, sort through them. Anything that ends up smaller than a golfball, put back into the garden. This will overwinter and you’ve got a jumpstart for the next year. Anything that has a thick/green neck still (referred to as a ‘bull neck’), eat right away. These don’t keep well at all. Anything that still has any green foliage in the neck, also eat right away. Once you’ve sorted out what you want to store, wash them well and get all the dirt off them and spread them out on screens or in wire baskets (we use the wire baskets from an old freezer), in a breezy dry place to dry. Then store in mesh bags in a cool dark place.

Enjoy.

But, what to do with them? Some of my most depressing moments in the kitchen (and as hard as it is to believe, Aunt Toby has moments of domestic self-loathing just like everyone else) have been in the middle of an August or early September heat wave, with the sauce on the stove and the canner going as well, and sweat dripping down my face (anyone wanting to excuse themselves may do so now), the sink full of washed tomatoes and three humongous bowls of freshly picked tomatoes sitting out on the counter. This is usually accompanied by the sound of the DH’s voice gaily wafting from the garden, “Hey – we missed a lot out here; I’ll pick them so the slugs won’t get them!”

Yep. Those are moments when a shower at the Bates Motel has a certain charm.

However, a bit of creativity and outright avoidance will get us through.
First: Drying.
One of the best ideas we had several years ago was to get an electric food dehydrator. We use this for just about everything that can be cut up and then used later, whether it’s fruit, veggies, onions, you name it. We had a lovely appetizer in an Italian restaurant on our last trip to Edinburgh, Scotland (vs Edinburgh, PA), which consisted of little tomatoes which had been dried and preserved with garlic in olive oil, accompanied by thin slices of mozzarella cheese. This works especially well with tomatoes such as Princip Borgese, but being a totally classless American, I did it with cherry and grape tomatoes. Same great ‘summer in a bottle’ flavor.

Second: Freezing.
Don’t ask me where we got this technique, but we’ve been using it for fruit for years and it works for really any veggie also that is not too watery (for example, it will not work with things like zucchini – to freeze summer squashes such as these, grate them up, squeeze out the excess water, bag up and freeze for things like baked goods later). What we do for tomatoes is slightly different but the theory is the same: Cut up the fruit in question, lay out on cookie sheets, leaving space in between, and put in the freezer. When they are completely frozen, take off the cookie sheet (you might need to pry them off with a spatula), put into bags or other freezer containers and seal. If you are using ziplock(tm) bags, close almost all the way and suck out the air. The fruit will still stay in separate pieces.

For tomatoes, there is just one small additional thing to do: once you’ve cut them up in pieces (and with a big tomato, you should be cutting it up into 6-8 pieces; with a plum tomato, probably 4 pieces), use a spoon and get out as much of the “gishy” gelatinous stuff inside as you can. In freezing this will be very watery when you defrost. But freezing is a great way to keep tomatoes for when you want to do something later. Later in the fall, when it’s cooler, the garden is done and when you need tomatoes OR, you actually want to do a bit of canning or make sauce or whatever, you just pull out the bags, throw the tomatoes in a pot and off you go. You can cook up whatever you want and serve or cook it up and using the directions on your canner, can it up then.
A bit of summer when you least expect it.

So, how do you know when they are ready? Well if you have soft necked garlic, the top of the plant just collapses and dries up. Once that happens, you are good to dig them up. If you have hard neck garlic (and these are obviously hard necked), the central stem dries up and turns white. Once that happens, the bulbs have matured and you can dig them up.

There are several ways to save garlic, but all of them start with cleaning and drying. Once you have dug the bulbs up, shake as much dirt off them as you can and rinse well. Put out in the sun and let them dry for a day. Some people save them in jars; there are methods of braiding the stems and the leaves. Here’s our method:
First: Make the decision of whether or not you are going to use any of this harvest to replant for next year. If the answer is ‘no’ then you can buy or order garlic stock from other sources. If the answer is yes, then look over the bulbs and choose the biggest healthiest one you have, split it up into cloves and plant into a prepared bed as far down as your hand can reach in soft soil. The best time to plant is right after the first frost in your area.

Second: Take the rest of your garlic, split into cloves and peel, break off the little root bit at the end, rinse off and put into some container that you can reopen, like a yoghurt container or a ziplock(tm) bag. If you are using a bag, you can suck out the excess air when you get to the last little bit to zip shut. Then just put into the freezer and use as you need them. Easy as pie and lasts seemingly forever.

Why do I like purple podded bush beans?
First: Earliness. Bush beans are notoriously finicky about soil temps. In general, if it’s not warm enough, they just lie there and rot at their leisure. Purple podded beans, for some reason (don’t ask me why; I have not a clue), can handle temperatures much much cooler than the standard, much beloved by all (but not by the Siberians, I’m afraid) “Bush Blue Lake’. So, I’d love them even if they did not have any other advantages.

Second: Hardiness against damp conditions. Again, bean seeds can be very delicate when it comes to spring conditions where it rains and it rains and it’s chilly and it’s raining and the soil is just wet. Again, I’ve had springs here where we’ve had to sow beans such as Bush Blue Lake several times before conditions have dried out enough for the damned things to germinate. Purple podded beans just pop up, no matter what.

Third: They have this ‘gee-whiz’ feature which is very helpful when you want to blanch and freeze them: Put them into boiling water and as soon as they turn from purple to green (and it’s a good, dark, pine green), YOU ARE DONE! Pull them, throw them into cold water, freeze them under whatever method you use (we use the ‘stick them into plastic bags and vaccuum seal them’ but to each his/her own). Just take a look at the photographs: Same mix of beans, same pot, photo just taken one minute apart. Magic. I love it.