Four Beans a Day

After grousing all summer about the low productivity of my admittedly small and relatively untended veggie garden, I'm beginning to see that it's actually a sort of tortoise-and-hare story out there. Slow and steady wins the race.

In this case, the race is to our plates.

We get about four green beans a day from the plants I put in early this summer, one or two beans per bush. By the end of the week, we have accumulated enough beans of various sizes to make a reasonable serving for the two of us. This has been going on for months and months and, given that the plants are shaded by taller things, rarely fertilized and hardly watered, I think that's pretty darn good.

The leaves are beginning to take on a tired air now, yellowing and curling like arthritic hands - I don't expect we'll have very many more days of bean production. But, that's what I said two months ago and we are still in greenie beanie heaven once or twice a week. What more could we ask?

Veggiemoticon

Couldn't resist.

The beans are today's harvest from my garden, and the big orange nose, too. I cheated a little and added eyes of organic cherry tomatoes from the grocery store. They are all going to be my lunch, I think.

Am I a cannnibal if I eat a person made from veggies?

Homegrown Bragging

Lettuce.

My very own. My very first.

Homegrown. Washed and ready to become salad, sandwich filler, lettuce wraps, or whatever! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

I didn't think so.

Slug Fest

Look at my poor mangled bean leaves! What were pretty, healthy, heart-shaped leaves are now half-chewed and distorted.

Almost every day, I throw another snail or two out of the garden but still I come out each morning to find that the slugs had the gastropod version of a Roman orgy while I was sleeping, oozing in to rasp away at my bean leaves and to engage in hermaphroditic sex.

So, today, I declared war.

I went back to Annie's Annuals, this time on a day when they were open, and asked for advice about slug bait. It's called Sluggo - the name cracks me up. Anyone out there remember Nancy and Sluggo from the funnies?

Luckily, there's an organic version of Sluggo so I bought a box and scattered some around my sad little seedlings. Tonight, the snails get their comeuppance! I'll lie in bed chuckling darkly and listening for their frustrated cries as they encounter my pelleted, blue-green vengeance.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Garden

Since I began urban farming, I have become intimately acquainted with poops.

Cookiecrumb advised me that chicken poop would grow great veggies and Moonbear had some as a by-product of her egg-laying chickens, so I was in business, so to speak. However, I learned that the chicken poop I retrieved from Moonbear's idyllic back yard is too new, too "hot" to put straight onto the garden, being this year's "issue." So, I have started a compost pile with the contents of the big bag the hens contributed, some soil and vermiculite knocked out of pots of flowers I have saved, and the yard waste from my latest biomass reduction foray into the garden.

That's fun, but it didn't solve the need for some kind of fertilizer for the growing things so I took Dagny's advice to visit Annie's Annuals in search of plant food. They were closed on the Monday I chose to go so, undeterred, I went to my favorite haunt, Pastime Hardware in El Cerrito and, lo and behold, they had poop, but theirs was bat poop, nicely aged and attractively packaged with assurances as to its potency and organic nature.

It has taken, so far, four adult college graduates to get this tiny garden going and I'm pretty sure I'd save money by simply buying ripe tomatoes when they come in season but what a great bonding experience for four diverse bloggers and what an education I have received in the nutritive value of poops!

Beanie Babies

It has been more than twenty years since I studied botany as an eager adult student, staring in awe down a microscope at chloroplasts circulating mysteriously inside plant cells, but the word jumped immediately to mind as soon as I saw them.

Cotyledons.

Those first, two fleshy leaves that plants push above the soil when they germinate, cotyledons have extra energy stored in them to give the plants a boost until they can produce leaves and, then, miraculously, food for themselves and for virtually everything else on Earth.

My bean plants have sprouted.

There are six little clusters of plants in a row in my garden, all destined to become Blue Lake green beans, if I remember to water them between now and bean production. As Robert Fulghum famously reminded us years ago, it's a wonder every time it happens.

Early Brandy

I cheated. I wasn't going to plant tomatoes this year - I missed the critical date to plant seeds and, besides, aren't green beans, zucchini, Swiss chard and lettuce enough, for heaven's sake? As my Mom used to joke, "What do you want, egg in your beer?"

Well, apparently, I do want egg in my beer because when I found these two cheater plants at the grocery store, they fairly leapt into my cart.

The brawny, strapping lass on the left is "Early Girl" and is bred to fruit early in the much-anticipated tomato season. The smaller one, an heirloom variety called "Brandywine," supposedly will fruit later in the summer, even though she has a flower open and buds already set. Don't you love plant names? I was tempted by Sun Gold and Beefsteak, also, but mostly for the names and I only have room for two.

I'm already imagining how good the fruit will taste in 50-100 days. Halfway through June with a little luck we should be snacking on our own tomatoes. I don't even feel guilty for cheating.

They're In There!

Taking a leaf, literally and figuratively, from Michael Pollan's latest essay in the New York Times, I decided that I have time now that I'm retired to plant a small garden. My steep hillside lot doesn't lend itself to much in the way of agriculture but I cleared a space in the flower garden, worked up the soil and planted near the drip watering pipe greenie beanies, lettuce, Swiss chard and zucchini. I wanted a cherry tomato plant or two as well, but when I read the seed packet it said I should have started them indoors six weeks ago so I may just rely on the farmers' markets for those.

I keep running outside to check if my seedlings are up. I'm like a little kid on a long car trip - "Are we there yet?"

I guess they need more than two days to sprout.