Fresh green beans and new potatoes
It was the time of the year when tables groaned under the delights of the season: bounteous harvests of fresh corn and beans and tomatoes and June apples and plums and peaches. Sometimes the big dinners had not a single meat on the table, only vegetables in amazing abundance. I recall such days when we would come in for our noontime meal. Mother would present a table brimming with wonderfully delicious crowder peas, sliced tomatoes, fried okra, cream corn that Dad had picked that very morning, plus hot biscuits and sweet milk. After such a meal, during that hot time of day, my father would stretch out on the living room floor with a book under his head, and take a half-hour nap. Afterward, we would return to the fields refreshed and ready for an afternoon of plowing.
—Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney
We’ve pretty much laid by the summer garden. There’s little things here and there that will need doing, but the heavy work is over for now.
I’ve always said summer is the best eating of the year because of the fresh garden truck available. The month of July is when it all comes together so nicely!
We have small ears on the corn and hopefully by the end of this month we’ll be eating them. Okra and peas are in bloom so they are on the horizon too.
The tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, squash, zucchini, cabbage, garlic, onions, new potatoes, herbs, and green beans straight from the garden have seemed extry special this year.
For the rest of the week I’ll be sharing about some of the good things growing in our garden.
Tipper
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What a beautiful dinner. I remember when momma made the first fruits of the summer garden. Always delicious and so satisfying. Daddy always put a small garden in for our family. He worked in the factory and had a long drive. He only had the small garden so he and some of us kids, that really liked gardening, could keep it up. Love you cooking videos, along with y’all working the gardens. Daddy would love it. Don’t know about momma. She also worked outside the home, with 9 children at home, made canning the veggies a hard job, even with the kids that helped. If you were around you were put to work too. With daddy you had a choice, not so much momma. LOL. Prayers up for all who asked and those who didn’t. God be with all and may He bless all who have requested His favor. In the Name of Jesus, Amen and Amen. Miss Tipper and Mr Matt, your gardens are absolutely beautiful. The rewards are great with the fruits of your labor. Love to you both and to the entire family. Those boys are so special. You are truly blessed and then some.
Potatoes and green beans is a favorite of ours. Yours look so yummy! Even if I have to use canned green beans, I will make this dish for us. I just cook them a long time with the potatoes and bacon and it’s still delicious! There is an Amish vegetable market about an hour away. I hope to go shopping there this week and get some fresh green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We did eat green onions from our ceramic pots on the porch for supper tonight…along with great northern beans, fried potatoes, salad and cornbread. The fresh onions made the meal.
And fresh sweet corn
Oh my goodness, looks so delicious! There’s nothing better than a fresh mess of beans, new potatoes, fresh cornbread, and a big ole pickled beet!! Whew doggy, so good!
Ours will be a few weeks yet, Lord will.
Delicious!! For sure the best eating of the year!
How many summer meals did we have with greasy beans or half runners plus fresh grown tomatoes, sometimes corn (or cornbread) and sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar, with a bit of sugar and water. I never grew tired of those meals. on a warm summer’s evening. And maybe a little watermelon to wash it down.
Hi Tipper and Acorns. I hope to stop by the produce stand on Friday on my way to the eye doctor and the cardiologist. I hope to find green beans. I keep everyone here and up Wilson Holler in my prayers. Please remember Ed and me in yours. Love ya.
Praying for you! Hope you get some beans. Wish I was close enough to share 🙂
That looks so delicious!!!!! Those with gardens are blessed this summer with all the cases of cyclospora that are popping up. Please everyone be so very careful if you are buying produce at the grocery store, and avoid salads and raw vegetables if you are eating out. Wash, wash, wash anything you buy, but the only way to kill the parasite is to cook the vegetables above 165 degrees. It is a miserable GI illness and can land you on meds or in the hospital. Eat what you grow and encourage sharing with neighbors that you know what they grow in their gardens or farms. A member of my church family was just diagnosed last week here in NC and is very sick.
When I was a kid, my favorite summertime meals were always out of the garden: green beans and baby potatoes, corn, squash, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and gravy made from bacon grease and served over biscuits or sometimes just torn-up slices of white bread. My brother complained about there being no meat at those meals, but that was hands-down my favorite.
I am just having my brekkie as I read this, Tipper, but sure could use a plateful of what you’re dishing up in this photo, so I think that will be what goes into my slow cooker this morning for enjoying later. There is no better flavor than that which is freshly picked, cooked and served right from one’s garden.
The first mess of fresh green beans tastes better than any steak in the fanciest restaurant. Add a pan of fried taters and a pone of cornbread, and you have a feast fit for a king. Daddy would say a meal like that will make your tongue slap your brains out. What a funny way to describe a meal! When I was growing up, we seldom had meat with our supper during the summer since the hog that Daddy killed in the fall had been eaten months before. All that was left was the lard to season the beans, fry the taters, and grease the iron skillet for cornbread.
Shirl, my daddy always said the same when something was so good. All us kids still use the phrase.
Ah, new potatoes. Don’t forget, August is when the watermelons get ripe. My daddy set the standard; he grew Black Diamonds and Congo; the former were round and dark green, the latter long, light with dark stripes. They got cross pollinated and the result was a long dark hybrid. Delicious, sweet. He set the standard; nothing store-bought comes up with it.
Tommy, my Daddy liked the red meat Moon and Stars, Grandaddy liked Charleston Gray (my favorite) and our neighbor grew Congo and Petoskey cantaloupes, these cantaloupes would be large but were bad to crack open on the bloom end and the get sour and spoil.
Those green beens look delicious enough to eat off the screen! I remember helping my mother snap beans in the summer. Add slices of juicy ripe tomatoes and a sweet cantaloupe, and we had a complete meal. We never gardened, but we were loyal customers of local roadside stands.
Oh the fresh delights this time of year are so yummy. We’re in revival this week through Wednesday and it has been fantastic so far. I’m asking for all who read this to pray hard for my daughter Mallory to accept the Lord as her Savior. There could be no greater joy for me than to know my little one is going to Heaven. Thank you all.
I will pray!
Praying with you for her salvation. There is no greater decision than to follow Christ. God bless you
Every summer my mom would make soup from fresh green beans and potatoes and bacon in a milk broth with salt and pepper. She grew up with her mom making it. They always had big gardens with 18 children and lots of mouths to feed. Your picture above made me remember that and looks just delicious! I’m excited to see what you’ll share about the garden the rest of the week.
Your post today makes me recall summer garden bounty when I was growing up. And I recall the first exposure to “exotic” food. Somehow, somewhere my adventurous user encountered pizza and fell in love with it. So she started making it at home from the Chef Boy Ardee boxed makings. We two boys would go outside and stay while that was going on. I mention that only because it is a pointed reminder of how much of rural America was weaned away from grow-your-own little by little. Thankfully there is movement back toward re-discovering how good we had it. Posts like yours today is another weight on the plus side of the scales. I just wonder how many restaurants in the USA are largely supplied directly from adjacent or nearby farms and ranches. Bound to be some, but how can one know?
Ron, I have wrote this before, like you we ate what we grew, I was 16 years old before i ever saw or tasted a pizza and thought pepperoni was pepper and wouldn’t eat it. The same thing applied to spaghetti and similar food. We ate very few hamburgers because we had to buy beef and did not eat in restaurants. Until I was married and on my own, a restaurant bought hot dog was a special treat for birthdays and such.
Your garden is now at its peak of production & is looking beautiful. All the hard work you & Matt & Katie put into it is really paying off now. Good garden …..well done!
I absolutely love green beans and new potatoes!
I didn’t plant any green beans this year, but seeing how pretty your green beans were when y’all picked them the other day, I sure wished I had. Now seeing them cooked with some potatoes and bacon, well that just makes me hungry for them. Fresh from the garden is always so much better anytime, but knowing they came from your own garden makes them taste extra special.
that looks really good this morning, I’d like to have some of that, God bless Papa Tony, in the name of Jesus Lord Heal his body, bless him with deliverance from sickness and disease, strengthen him comfort him, bless all the doctors and knowledge and wisdom of the situation at hand, bless all the medications used, and any ext
instruments that might be used, bless them Lord for the healing of his body, in Jesus name I pray amen
Your meal in the picture looks delicious!
Hope Bible school is fun for you. Blessings from our house to yours. ♥️
What a blessing to have such an abundance. The garden brings such satisfaction and happiness to me and when the harvest is successful even better. Enjoy!
Seeing the picture is making me miss my garden! Next year we will have a garden again, but in the meantime I’ll hit up the farmers markets around here and get some fresh greenbeans!
I remember eating like that during the summer months when we would have the big gardens. The difference would be it was for supper after Daddy got home from work. Last night, I ate fresh G90 corn on the cob that was pulled over the weekend, if it tasted any better than that did I couldn’t stand it. Last week I ate fresh green beans that looked like the ones in the picture, for the first time I cooked the beans, ham, and potatoes for about 8 hours in a crock pot. I really did like them cooked that way. I also had cabbage last week along with a pone of unsweetened corn bread. I even finished this meal up eating some cornbread crumbled up in pot likker. My Grandaddy Kirby was very serious about taking a short nap each day except on Sunday after eating his dinner (noontime meal), I had to go home while he took his nap, he would have been up by daylight and have worked all morning, often times plowing his garden or bigger feed corn patch with his mule Kate. She looked as forward to this noontime break as he did. Grandmother would ring a bell and Kate would immediately stop even it was in the middle of the row and refuse to move until she was unhooked from the plow. She would pull the sled with us on it back to the house.
those green beans look good (the picture), my mom and grandma could make the best green beans and new potatoes (they both also made good fresh creamed english-sweet-peas with new potatoes) but I could never get mine to taste as good as theirs…I expect I just was so anxious to eat them when I did the cooking that I probably did not spend enough time allowing them to cook to the goodness I had memory of and cooking just for me I did not always add the love that makes everything taste better.
Praying VBS is going well, that life changing decisions would be made, and all the kids as well as the helpers will gow in The Lord this week. My childhood VBS memories are some of my fondest.