Runner Bean Ranch

09/29/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

Two sparkly mornings in a row. We took the warnings seriously, but row covers will only carry you so far in this savage world of gardening. Squash isnt even built for the challenge. I feel like the cucumbers got what they deserved. Everything under plastic was just fine. Still having the best lettuce season ever. Peppers are pouring it on. Tomatoes continue to disappoint; they are consistent I'll give them that.

We had a respectable showing on the garlic front this year, we grew it in the old hay bale beds after some beans. The last big push is the pop corn which is taking a whole month of Sundays to dry down.

09/24/2026

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09/16/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

We were delivering CSAs Monday in Moscow and we couldnt help but notice the leaves are starting to turn. We saw a couple really bright red maples. Ready or not here it comes. We are both ready and not ready. We are ready for the cooler weather and these past couple of days with rain have been really nice. From a melon, winter squash, green bean point of view, we are going to need it to stay nice for a few more weeks.

How about a few random pictures that make no sense.

09/01/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

Its been nothing but dust smoke and heat, and rather than point out the obvious I thought I would wait for something to change and it did. That breeze a few days back was a little on the cool side. It felt a whole lot like Autumn, which really is just right around the corner. That gentle breeze turned into some chaotic gusts on Saturday, it became challenging. Nothing duct tape couldnt fix there in the moment, but it looks like we have acquired another spare parts tent.

We found some grapes the other day. Back behind the barn where we have the wheat planted. To clarify, we knew the grapes were there, we just didnt know they were working this season. This has been a weird season, some things are doing great other things are just failing to thrive. Never have we had a season where the summer squash wasnt the over achiever. This season hasnt been the case and it hasnt been for lack of trying on our part. The peppers are participating; the tomatoes are not. Turns out the grapes were back there in the bindweed charging right along. We knew they were ripe because the hornets had found them, heads buried in the grapes like Winnie the Pooh. Without the charm of a talking stuffed bear.

Here is a random thing that I thought was funny. Walking back to the shop from the house the other night I noticed the moon had a big bite out of it and it made me stop. I looked at that for a minute and actually convinced myself that what I was seeing was normal and maybe it was the clouds. I managed to gaslight myself. It wasnt until a day or two later when my Mom asked me if I saw the lunar eclipse that I put the whole thing together.

So with that information. I saw a bat fly through the Tuesday Market the other day. It was another one of those things. This huge black butterfly awkwardly flits through the market tent. I look around to see if anybody else noticed it, I hadnt been working with any solvents inside a closed room so we could take that off the table, so I was about to chalk it up as madness, when the thing came back through, this time in front of witnesses and sort of slapped itself to the side of a tree just behind the tent. It clung out there long enough for me to get a really good look at it. Then it flitted off out past the office building and was gone.

Pretty far out man.

08/14/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

Still hot, still smoky, still August. We are hand harvesting the wheat. It snaps right off in the evenings, its almost fun. Its a landrace wheat but I got to lookin' at it and I noticed some of this wheat aint quite like the rest of it. Turns out the durum wheat I had seeded I dont know how many springs back, chose now to get into the game. So thats interesting.

A deer scooted under the netting around the green beans. Stripped off about sixteen feet of the round beans. May it die on the highway sooner than later.

It didnt take all the beans and I need to be thankful for that.

08/07/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

I open with that every time and I might have explained it once in a newsletter. Its sort of a tribute to the great Stan Lee. He opened every issue of Spider-Man with "Hey True Believers..."

It still makes no sense what so ever, but it makes sense to me.

So, still hot, still smokey, but its now August and its supposed to be like that, August is a brutal month. Brown and crispy, the weeds have won and the hornets are in a frenzy. They are now heavily defending the strawberry patch, my Mom got stung a couple of times this morning. Me trying to be proactive swatted a hornets nest yesterday. Not a metaphor. I thought it would be a good idea to remove a hornets nest above the doorway, before they got too territorial. For reasons unexplained I thought it would be a good idea to do it in the afternoon. I thought I could be quick about it, thought I would be faster than the hornets. I was not. They came down hot, angry and impressively accurate; stung me multiple times in the face, mostly going for my eyes. Good times, it really burned and my whole face puffed up immediately, what a debacle. I should have ran that one by the good idea committee. It still made me laugh though. What else are you going to do right? I mean other than eat a handful of Benadryl and think about how that could have gone better. It was about quitting time anyway.

We have been digging potatoes. Potatoes have been a bit of a struggle for us. It seems like the harder we try the worse off we are. Some years we get whats left of great potatoes because the rodents got to them first. Other years we get great potato plants but very few potatoes and find that the rodents have gotten to them first. This year we didnt really try at all, we hoed a bunch of shallow trenches tossed some potato chitts in, covered them, just barely at that. Watered them when we remembered to and we got the best potatoes ever. I dont care what the doctors say. Potatoes are the best.

The corn is just now starting to make silk. Its a variety called "Root B**r" a 100 day popping corn. The earwigs took the fun out of growing sweet corn.

08/05/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?
The neighbors are over the hill cutting and the air is full of smoke and chaff...to clarify, the smoke and the chaff are separate events. So I thought I would come inside and tell a story.

The story is about the Fear and Loathing of lettuce. Lettuce creates a lot of anxiety and maybe the best way to get the point across is to tell you a story about cabbage. Way back in the day when we were doing the Pullman Farmers Market, back when it was in the parking lot of The Spot Shop, a fellow farmer gave us a cabbage. You could tell they were pretty proud of it and it did in fact look pretty nice, cabbage can be challenging to grow. We thanked them for it and all the way home I was thinking about the coleslaw I was going to make out of it. I cut that cabbage open and it was full of caterpillars. I'm known for my "artistic license", but when I say it was full of caterpillars I mean there was an impressive amount of them. The cabbage could not be salvaged. We thought about it all week. "Should we tell them about the cabbage?" We decided that we would only tell them if they asked how the cabbage was, which they did not. I have thought about this for years. Our final weigh in on it was that we should have told them. Why? Because if we sold somebody a product that was inedible, we would want to know about it. We would want to know so that we could make the customer whole, we would want to know so that we could strategize on a way to keep it from happening again.

So here we are in the midst of a lettuce scare that has people boiling lettuce or just not buying it at all. We are still growing it and selling it as whole heads. We are selling it with the understanding that the customer should rinse it. Preferably, the customer should take the lettuce head out of the bag peel it back a bit looking for wildlife. It should be chopped up placed in a bowl full of water swished around then strained off, rinse and repeat three times, then spin it out, put it in a sealed container and put it in the fridge. It should be eaten sooner than later. It sounds like a lot of work right? It also sounds like a lot of water too. Thats what we thought and thats why we dont sell a lettuce mix any more. We dont sell it because we also think people assume they can eat it right out of the bag. Just like all mushrooms are edible at least once.

This morning I parted out the three remaining heads of lettuce from last nights market and one of them looked great on the outside but was heavily damaged by earwigs in the center. I immediately got a sinking feeling, thinking about all the people that have bought lettuce from us and all the CSA customers that get lettuce from us weekly. Would they tell us if they got a bad head of lettuce? Would they say nothing and just chalk it up as life on the Serengeti? Would they simply never buy lettuce from us again? We lose sleep over this kind of stuff. Its pretty stressful.

I think it stresses the slugs and earwigs out too.

Why should you wash your produce? I mean aside from me telling you to. This is a picture of the dunk water. Rinse one from the full heads. Yeah, its grown in the ground, out there in the wild, its freakin' dirty. Its a dirty life.

07/31/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

This has been a tough week, its not just the heat or the smoke, those are things that come with summer. Eventually you learn to roll with it and those are things we have no control over anyways. We do have control over our time and I feel like we have squandered it, I feel like we put too many things off and assumed there would always be time for some things. Then life throws you a curve ball, it hits you with the last thing you had ever expected and it makes you wish you had picked up the phone, it makes you wish you had made the extra effort to tell someone how much you miss them, or how much their friendship means to you, or how excited you are for them in their successes. Then its too late. You have to do this and wish that you had done that.

For as simple as we try to make it, life is actually pretty complicated, I cant speak from first hand experience, but I like to think that I am a pretty observant person, so when I say that being a Mother has to be one of the hardest jobs there is, especially when one of the worst things you dont even want to imagine happens. It is devastating. I do know what its like being the older Brother, I know what its like to get slammed with the worst news, the thing that wasnt ever supposed to happen. It is a tough thing to get through. I have always suspected that life isnt about whats fair. This week reinforced that. Life is not fair and this week some friends of ours have had their hearts crushed. Its hard to be on this side of it. Its hard knowing that there is nothing we can do to make it better, its never going to be better, its always going to be there. The only thing my Mom and I can take away from this is knowing that we need to try harder and when we feel like telling someone that we care for them and miss them we should do that. Do it right there in the moment, because we might never get the chance again.

The thing that really gets me is that I was just thinking about the two of them the other day laughing to myself about his shirt that said "I'm big, you're small. Get over it." It was hard to imagine him being the "little" brother. Of course Jay grew up to be bigger than me too.

07/24/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

Another hot one today, the corn seems to like it. We on the other hand are getting as much work done as we can before the noon whistle and spending some quality time inside the walk in cooler.

We had to dig out some horseradish and decided to bring it to market. If you have a patch of horseradish you probably understand where we are coming from, that plant likes to take the show on the road. What started out as us foolishly leaving a single root in a pot on the actual ground, turned into a patch almost as impressive as the patch my Grandfather planted down by the mailbox. That patch is still there, no longer in full sun its under the shade of the two now full grown junipers my Grandfather had planted as well. I have a distinct memory of my Grandfather digging horseradish and grinding it in the kitchen. Its a short memory and it might be the only time I had ever heard my Grandmother curse. Grinding horseradish is a pretty effective way of clearing a house. I dont think there are any set rules to digging horseradish other than digging it this time of year is pretty hard on a shovel. Its oddly sweet, just before your whole face starts to melt off. I love it. Especially with breaded and fried zucchini rounds. Another fun fact about horseradish; the leaves contain a whole lot of tannin which help to keep pickles crisp. I read it in a book, I have no personal experience to back up that claim; normally it wouldnt matter because by this time the flea beetles would have reduced the leaves to lace. Not this year, no real explanation for that either.

We cut some lettuce a little early and not a lot of it, for the sole purpose of keeping us in the lettuce game for another week. We are bringing the last of the flat beans out of the hoop house. They got away from us and are getting a little tough, the sheep suggested we pull them. The beans planted outside are almost there. This is the farewell tour for the fennel, unlike The Eagles the fennel wont be coming back. We put parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in the CSAs last week. For market we are just bringing the parsley. Why? Because I honestly dont need that song in my head for all of Saturday, and the thyme is really past its prime. There will be scallions and baby to juvenile beets with really nice greens. I was a little shocked to find some people have never steamed beet greens. I have to laugh when people say "beets taste like dirt", I believe the correct term is "earthy", I suggest they wash them next time before they cook them, I also acknowledge that they are not wrong. I like them anyway, just like I dont mind that cilantro tastes like soap. The older we get the more weird stuff we are willing to eat.

07/17/2026

Howdy Ranch Fans, whats The Good Word?

I'm getting a late start on this one, what can I say we were kind of in the weeds this week. We never really did get completely finished weeding out the garlic before it was time to dig it up. Over all it was a pretty good showing. We lost one to a cultivating fork, which is good, it means we will get at least one head of garlic for ourselves. A vole sampled a few until it finally decided on the two it was going to eat completely. Some of us would probably just tunnel around the garlic to get to where we were going, this rodent was dedicated, had a plan and was sticking to it.

The romano beans are pouring it on, we will certainly be bringing some of them to market. We have fennel with fronds again this week, as well as baby beets with nice looking greens. Last call on the salanova and little gem lettuce, we have to make room for the next round of redheads and romaine. All the little cabbages that didnt get up to speed in time are coming to market too, little pocket sized cabbages, cute as the dickens.

I cant believe how fast this season is going. We will be into tomatoes, peppers and eggplant before we know it.