To My Garden Helper...

Dear V,

Remember those beans you helped me plant when you were here?  First we scratched up the dirt and mixed in the chicken manure.  This was to make sure that when the seedlings started growing the dirt would be nice and soft for their little roots, and they would have good things to eat (the chicken poop).

Next we put the bamboo grid on the first garden bed.  The grid had sixteen spaces, a square foot each.  Into each space you put three rows of three seeds each.  I followed behind you and poked each seed into the dirt with my planting stick. When we finished that bed we went on to the second one, and then the third.

The sun was hot, and we were sweating, and your back hurt from bending over for a long time, but we persevered.

Nine seeds x 16 squares x 3 garden beds = 432 seeds...and every one of them sprouted!  Now each of those 432 plants is giving dozens of green beans, which contain the young seeds to make future plants grow.  And every time I pick a bean, the plant thinks "I'd better hurry up and make more seeds before the weather turns cold!"  So it puts out more flowers, which turn into more beans for me to pick. 

We're having an avalanche, a hurricane, a tsunami of beans.

I wish you were here to help me deal with it.

Just think--all those bright and tender beans for us to eat from now until next summer, and to share with others (I'll bring you a big basketful when we come for your birthday).  And all we did was stick a bunch of seeds into some dirt.  We didn't have to put in chemical fertilizers to feed the plants, because the hen poop did that job, and we didn't have to spray herbicides because the plants grew so close together that the weeds couldn't get any sun, so they never sprouted.

I don't know whether you will want to grow your own vegetables when you are older.  But I hope that you'll remember how generously the earth rewards us if we show her a little kindness.  And I hope that you will always pay attention to your food, and to where and how and by whom it was grown.

Hugs,

Lili (Lali's nom de grandmere)

The Harvester's Complaint

Today I pulled up the tomato vines and removed their wire cages.  There were still green tomatoes on the vines, but I needed to get rid of the plants so we could install another of the raised beds that my husband made early in the summer.   

Now five of the nine beds are in, but only three have been filled.  It takes a huge amount of dirt and compost to fill a 4'x4'x2' box.  We are using the dirt that was removed during the making of the patio and fish pond, and left in piles at the edge of the woods.  We cannot transport it in the garden cart because we would have to lift the loaded cart over the 2' walls of the beds.  Instead, we use a large plastic tub with a handle on each side, my husband holding one and I the other.  Those tubs of dirt are terribly heavy--far worse than boxes of books--and, keeping our backs in mind, I only let us do a few tubfuls at a time.  Which means that it is taking forever to fill those beds.


Meanwhile, the garden is still going great guns.  Guarded by squadrons of daddy long legs, the beans are maturing so fast that by the time I get to them, many are as thick as fingers.  Fortunately Wolfie and Bisou find them almost as tasty as chicken legs, so I am saved from the great sin of letting a single bean go to waste.


After the bean picking, I realized that the banana peppers think that we are still in August.  I relieved the plants of all but the smallest fruit, and went into the kitchen.  I filled the blanching pot with water and set it on the stove.  While the water heated (which, as those of you know who have an electric stove, takes eons), I seeded and sliced the peppers and put them in the dehydrator.  By the time I was done with that, the water was boiling, and I put the beans in it to blanch.  Then I cooled them in ice water, put them in bags, and took them down to the freezer.

I stuffed the beans into the freezer, and then had trouble closing the door.  If this Indian summer doesn't go away soon, we'll have to buy another freezer.  Did I mention that the pepper plants are full of blooms, that the chard and kale are flourishing, that the bean plants are loaded with baby beans?  In fact, I should probably be out there picking those little beans right now, before they get so big they're only good for the dogs.

Green Bean Time

What with the drought and everything, the beans have been slow coming in this year.  But today, after a weekend away, I found my drought-stressed plants nevertheless in full swing.

I like picking beans, but it's a delicate task.  The plants are fragile.  The hairy heart-shaped leaves are as thin as batiste handkerchiefs.  You brush against one and, unlike, say, a pepper leaf, it doesn't spring back, but stays looking crumpled and resentful.  The stems are knobby and turgid, ready to break off in your hand at the merest tug. And the early beans grow low in the plant, so that you have to swish the foliage around to get to them.

I hate it that, when I'm through picking, the entire patch is left looking harassed and upset.  But bean plants are drama queens.  I know that by tomorrow morning, revived by the dew, they will once again resemble a miniature jungle, the dark, impenetrable habitat of that fearsome predator, the daddy longlegs.

I pick my beans as young as I can get them, aiming for a maximum diameter of two-eighths of an inch.  But in every basketful I find some that already show the swelling of early pregnancy, while others, pre-pubertal, are about as thick as one of Wolfie's whiskers.  That means that after I wash them and snap them and give the stem ends to the chickens, my beans will--horrors!--cook to different levels of doneness.  They would never pass muster in a green-bean-processing plant.

But my beans, some fat, some thin, all born from seeds that I personally pushed into the ground with my planting stick, melt in the mouth and taste like the food of the gods even to people like me, who don't really like green beans.