Friday, September 20, 2013

Fall Garden and Mesquite Flour


After a busy summer with our Texas Parks and Wildlife project and a period of illness I am back into the swing of things.

I have gotten my Fall garden planted and am pretty excited about that and have high hopes of it doing well. I have all kinds of things planted, including some beans, tomatoes etc. that some would still consider "summer" vegetables, but believe me, we have a good 90 days before we get a freeze so this is still ideal growing weather for just about everything. Temps are still reaching low 90s at this point and will probably continue to do so for some time.

On a trip to south Texas this past weekend, I took advantage of the fact that the honey mesquite trees had recently produced a lot of mesquite beans and gathered as many as I could so I can make flour with them. Actually I was a little behind schedule. I probably should have gone about a month ago to pick because deer and cattle had grazed most of them but there should be another harvest in about a month and I will go back and get more.

Mesquite beans grind into a sweet flour that is low glycemic and gluten free and if you look online (amazon etc.) you will find it is quite expensive. The mesquite trees in my area don't produce the beans (different type of mesquite) but there are plenty of honey mesquites in south Texas that produce the beans plus I have family there so I combine the family visit with foraging for the beans!
Info on mesquite bean foraging:
http://www.foragingtexas.com/2008/10/honey-mesquite.html 


1 comment:

  1. Glad that you are back in the swing of things. I'm trying to get a butterfly-friendly garden started. We have just one milkweed plant and we need to get more.

    ReplyDelete

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