Our Yard Long Beans...Seriously.

  Our good friend, Todd, mentioned to us, last year, that he had grown some 'yard long green beans' aka "asparagus beans", and that he and his family loved them.  He told me that they grew all summer and were easily maintained.  Well, even tho' we'd never heard of 'em, we are always looking for stuff that withstands our hot, humid summer heat, so this sounded to us, like something that we needed to try. 
   With this in mind, we ordered them online. To make room for  these "yard long beans",  in mid-June, when all of our pitiful, paltry producing pea vines had dried up, we unceremoniously dragged them off the trellises on either ends of our main garden box, where they were clinging tenaciously by their dried tendrils, with their few inch long offerings, that they were trying to pass off as peas in a pod. Promises, promises. 
  Now, carefully, with one eye on the birds, who were sitting above our heads on the electric wires, closely observing our endeavors, and who had sneakily feasted on every cucumber seed (and new little cucumber seedling) that we had planted in the Spring, (in the same spot we had planted those lying peas) we  planted 12 of these beans along each end of our 4 ft wide raised bed garden. 
   What to our wondering eyes should appear, only a few scant days later...these beans jumped up outa the ground, looked around and began vining and crawling to the top of our eight foot tall trellis, then began reaching out long 'feelers', as if to say, "Is this all ya got?" in the way of things for them to climb on. "That's it," we said, "That's all the room we've got for you...go for it." So they did. Before long, we noticed lots of double flowers. 

Hmm, that was curious. We wondered what they were planning to do with two flowers. From these 2 flowers sprouted 2 beans.

Which grew,

and grew 'til the trellises were full of green "icicles", hanging from top to bottom. Green beans. Some actually are about a yard long; no kiddin'.

Well, me and my sidekick,  Beaux went to picking them and this is the rough video Peggy made of my silly self doing it.

Once we got them picked ,we decided to clean and cut them into lengths that fit in a ziplock bag and we managed to get 4 fat bags full. (no, we didn't blanch 'em...just stuck 'em in the bags and froze 'em...never had a problem with doing it this way before.)

We will see what the Summer brings. The only other thing we've seen take off like this, were those volunteer butternut squashes.  Now, we see that, since these beans have run out of trellis, they are grabbing onto the okra stalks, which are trying to grow tall. When they are about eight feet tall, they will display a beautiful flower,  which then will be replaced by a light green okra.  Since the okra aren't growing fast enough for these eager beans to climb onto, they have wound themselves around the fence, as well...anything they can get their ...tendrils onto. If they start eyeing one of the trees, and decide to make a run for it across the lawn, they will learn a very hard lesson, the same way Peg and I learned our lesson with the squash. We're really not complaining, tho', cuz it appears that we will have no shortage of these 'cool', hot weather beans. 
  Now, I wonder what recipes our good buddy, Todd, came up with for all these yards and yards and yards of asparagus beans and how he easily controlled 'em from taking over the garden.  The okras are impatiently waiting to hear.