Beans and Tomatoes

Here are my first few tomatoes and beans of the season.

The three brown tomatoes are brown berry.  The yellow one is Blondkopfchen.  The tiny red one is Matt’s Wild Cherry.  All were grown in my greenhouse except Matt’s Wild Cherry, which is from my roof.

The beans are Dog bean.  It’s a bush variety, which are usually a little earlier than pole beans.  The Dog bean is a multi-purpose bean, good green as well as dried.   This post has a picture of what the beans look like dry, and they are similar to kidney beans.  Several other bloggers grew this bean before, or are growing it now:  Rebsie, Ian and Gintoino.  I’ve given the seeds to some other people too, so maybe they will post about it when they grow it too.  The Dog bean is probably from Croatia, from the Dalmatian coast.  This bean was selectively bread, then renamed, from a bean originally called the Dalmation bean and there was probably a misunderstanding over what the name really meant.

Update 7 July:

We had the dog beans for dinner last night, and they were really good!  In part I’m sure because they were very fresh.  The flavor was a very intense and delicious.  The texture was also really nice, crispy and chewy.  I don’t think we’ve tasted the green beans of this variety before.