Notes from the Garden: Yard Long Beans & Armenian Cucumbers

If you are looking for new veggies to grow in your garden and wondering what is suitable to grow in our unique climate, especially through the hot part of the year, start looking through seed catalogues for varieties from the Middle East or South East Asia. Plants bred in these parts of the world can handle some heat. Mid East veggies have also been bred to survive on less water.

This immature Armenian Cucumber should be ready to harvest later this week!

We've got two such worldly veggies just getting ready to harvest in the Monument Garden. You may have seen Armenian Cucumbers earlier in the season from Fruitful Hill Farm. They developed quite following for thier sweet, juicy, and tender flesh. Also called Serpent Melons, these slightly fuzzy coiling fruits are actually melons, but resemble cucumbers more in taste. Unlike true cucumbers that can sometimes get bitter, I have never met a snake melon that bit back!

Yard Long Beans growing on the same trellis as the Armenian Cucmbers

The other exotic variety that will be appearing in the market later this week from our garden is the Yard Long Bean. I was inspired to grow these by some urban farmer friends in Austin as well as Windy Hill Farm, who brought us a steady supply of these superb green and purple beans this summer. Also called noodle bean, or snake bean, they are a variety of cowpea native to Southeast Asia, grown extensively in Southern China and Thailand. Quick growing, heat loving, delicious and good for you, yard long beans are a good source of protein, vitamin A, thiamin, riboflavin, iron, phosphorus, and potassium, and a very good source for vitamin C, folate, magnesium, and manganese. You can cook them anyway you would cook a regular green bean!
It is too late to plant either of these heat loving veggies now, but keep them in mind when you start to plan your garden for next spring! Meanwhile, you can visit the Monument Market to try them. If anyone else has experimented with exotic vegetable varieties and found them suited for the Texas Heat, I'd love to hear about them!