Pole bean & dinner

Sinfonian asked about our pole bean harvest, so I went to take a few more pictures.

Though we play with the idea of keeping track of how much veggies we produce, we decided it isn't practical to do so. We pull a carrot, pick a few sungold tomatos or snack on the peas whenever we walk by the plant. It will be impossible to know exactly how much we grow. (we did count how many heads of garlic we harvested though!)

Since this is our first time to grow pole bean, we are very happy with the result. We don't pick them everyday, but there are enough for the two of us.

So here's the dinner menu (except the fish, everything is picked from the garden):

• Mesclun green with sungold tomato, carrot, cucumber and chives
  
• Steamed pole beans with chili (see chili post), tarragon and butter on bbq
  
• Grilled eggplant
  
• Grilled sardines (bought from the fishmonger down the street)
  
• Homemade ice-cream

(oh, by the way, the ceramic platter is handmade also!)

The foil pouch (on the left of the pic) under the grill is our garden beets. We'll make a beet salad for the next day.

We watched the US Open (tennis) women's final during dinner and having sardines was a bad idea. There were so many bones to pick and I missed watching a lot of the great shots. However, sardines is good for you and I finished them all.

The eggplant on the menu is our first eggplant of the year. It takes much longer to grow than what the label says. The plant is also much shorter than I expected. It gets really bushy and there are a lot of flowers blooming but not many plants producing. Am I supposed to cut off some branches just like a tomato plant? Should I do some trimming? So far, they are a few of about 3 inches long. The mature size is 6 inches. Mark sliced the one that we picked into 4 slices. One slice fell into the grill, and now we got 3 small slices of homegrown eggplant. They surely taste good.