Out in the garden, I don’t know what the winter-grown cabbage plants have been reading but someone has convinced them to abandon normal cabbage behavior in favor of mass seed production, which I suppose is nice for their (apparent) goal of Earth domination (the cabbage apocalpyse) but utterly inadequate when it comes to my spring salads. These mutant cabbage plants (cell phone towers…?) are taller every day and each about to burst into some sort of bloom instead of any sort of cabbage head. (I don’t expect to like the flowers.)

Nice polite lettuces have come to be quite an embarrassment to the cabbages.

Now we move on to a stand of onions known far and wide (from the picket fence clear to the greenhouse) as the Great Onion Forest. It includes three varieties of happy onions who aspire only to become parts of my suppers, growing there in the shadow of the perennial herb bed, which is just beyond (chives, French sorrel, chard, Greek oregano…)

You may observe that the onions were all clipped before the Gardener planted them outside and the reason the Gardener did that is because some onion expert book-writer guy told her to and she just hopes he was right about it even though he’s been wrong before but we are not going to talk about cucumbers right now.

Next, exciting news from the Fate Department, which is where we find this report on the new accidental bean trellis.

You may sense that, once upon a time, this bean trellis had an incarnation as a farm gate…

But that was before Mr. O drove the tractor down the lane to pick up and transport a huge length of a fallen oak tree and the tree snagged the gate as it traveled past and reconfigured it to a perfect 90 degree angle thus morphing it (the gate not the tree) into the free-standing bean trellis you see here. Add to that the fact that I bought bean seeds this year. (There are no coincidences.) (ps: the gate was not in actual use as a gate before it underwent the fortuitous transformation.)

Now. That is quite enough press, or screen, about vegetables so we will move right on to the cute little maidenhair fern clump (adiantum capillus-veneris) which was languishing last year but is smiling in its handmade tufa pot (which if it looks like a mixing bowl is because it was cast in a mixing bowl).

In other news, the fruit trees are all thinking seriously of blossoms but discreetly waiting for just a bit more security, weatherwise. Only the ornamental cherry has wrecklessly, no of course I meant recklessly (with a tip of the bottle to  Kininvie), opened all flowers and I do appreciate its brave forging ahead into heaven knows what sort of next weather but of course there is no fruit at risk here.

The native trilliums are in various stages of upness, this (Trillium ovatum) one getting the prize for earliest blooms.

It is simply the time of year when everything is growing like crazy and I like to wander around the gardens and see which things I planted in the fall on top of which then-dormant spring things so that now there are lots of places with two things growing together, so interesting and kind of like attending a botanical prize fight.

Oh I suppose I will rescue the astilbe from that pushy delphinium–

I love beans, all types of beans, and fresh picked beans are the best.  They are crispy and sweet when blanched.  Some beans are good to eat fresh like Asian Long bean.   So I’ve never missed growing beans each summer.   In the past, growing beans has taken up some valuable space in our small vegetable garden owing to the ‘teepees’ I constructed to hold them up.   I had to give the base enough circumference to withstand the wind so a large chunk of space inside the circle was wasted.   Then I bought a couple of ready-made metal bean poles that take up one square foot in area and stand seven feet tall.   They were great as they used less space and each has four pegs to hold it to the ground.  But, the rust was a problem and when the beans grew really thick I had difficulty reaching the pods inside the square without breaking the vines.

I had a Eureka moment one day when I walked under one of the trellises.  Why not grow the beans on a trellis?   The bean flowers look pretty and the pods will hang nicely.  It doesn’t take up space if I put the trellis over the walkway and it doesn’t matter how thick the beans grow I can walk under them when I want to pick beans.

Have you ever tried to find a small trellis that can go over a mere two feet of walkway?  It was like finding a needle in a haystack.   So I ended up making my own from plastic garden rods and they work really well.  Thinking outside the box frequently works well.  This time I just thought of  beans as a vine flower like Clematis or Moonflower, not a vegetable.

Asian Long Bean ‘Red Noodle’ grew up the home-made trellis nicely

This one is for the Italian Beans

Bean pods drop beautifully from the top and are easy to pick from both sides

Camp NaNoWriMo Progress

For about one day, I was caught up on my novel. I really was. I even had, like, 200 extra words. On Friday that all went out the window. See, Chris is working in Minneapolis full time, so he’s only home on the weekends. That means that, whenever he’s here, the regular schedule I’ve so diligently put myself on gets thrown out in favor of doing fun things together or catching up on house and yard things together. And I’m totally all right with this. Our summer is short here in Duluth, so we have to enjoy each moment of it that we get. I have a week off now, so I will catch up. Plus, sometimes the thing that Chris and I decide to do together is go to a coffee shop and work on our respective projects. So then I do get more writing done those times when he’s here.

Tashi enjoys when we let him hang out in the yard with us, too. His favorite activities are getting pet while basking in the sun and exploring. He is not an outside cat, but we let him come outside supervised for short periods of time. When we don’t let him out, we sometimes have the pleasure of listening to him yowl at us in the windowsill for 15 minute stretches of time.

What I like about summer, when it’s not too hot, is that I can do everything outside. I’m sitting in the shade right now on the deck, looking out into the yard and admiring my freshly planted vegetable garden. While I enjoyed my coffee after breakfast this morning, I knitted on the pair of socks I’ve been working on for Chris forever! It’s taken so long because for a while I was having weird pain spasms all up and down my left arm and wrist, so I thought it was a good idea not to do the things that caused them, like knitting. It was sad, but I think it’s had a good rest now and is over.

Vegetable Garden

Yesterday we worked outside for ten hours! We got up early enough to be at the farmer’s market when it opened at 7am, a first for us. My attempt at starting plants indoors failed again this year, so we relied on the farmer’s market for some great plants to get our garden going. The $25 investment in seedlings will be well worth all the vegetables we get later!

This is our second year wtih our magnificent raised bed garden. Last summer I planted 13 tomato plants way too close to each other, and they EXPLODED all over the garden and flopped over the pepper plants and stole the sun from them. Add to that, we’d planted late because of the time it took to build the garden and get the dirt, so we had a LOT of green tomatoes in September. I have high hopes for this year–I was more moderate with my 6 nicely spaced tomato plants, but I may have crammed some other things in there tight. What I did, though, was intersperse different kinds of plants together. So I planted onions and lettuce in the spaces between the peppers, and I put snap pea and pole bean seeds practically everywhere because they put nitrogen back in the soil, which helps the other plants grow.

I’m going to take pictures of the garden as it grows. Here is Day 1.

The big plants in the foreground are the pepper plants. We have 2 jalapeño plants, 1 banana pepper, 1 hungarian hot wax pepper, 1 green bell pepper, and 2 others that I don’t know the name of that Chris’s mom gave us. On the back row are the tomato plants. 2 big slicing tomatoes and 4 cherry tomato plants. I love love love cherry tomatoes, especially straight off the vine.

The big trellis behind the tomato plants will be for snap peas and pole beans. The section of green fencing on the inside of the garden has zucchini seeds planted under it, and I plan to tie them up and grow them vertically. I haven’t got them in much space, so it’ll be an experiment. I won’t cry if it doesn’t work.

On the zucchini side of the garden, the little green spikes you can see are leeks. I planted a few rows of them and had so many left over that I planted them in every extra space I could. I did the same thing with the onions on the pepper side of the garden. Both deter pests with their oniony smell, so I’m hoping the random scattering will be good. I was really excited to see, when I pulled the onion seedlings apart, that many were already forming tiny little bulbs! Onions are one of my favorite vegetables, so I will be really excited if they’re successful in my garden.

When it comes to gardening, one of my biggest influences is my nonna (Italian Grandmother). She utilizes all the space that she has, and she doesn’t grant aesthetics any undo importance.  (Her garden is the one place where appearances don’t matter to her.) She has a cucumber plant growing in a mini bed on the plot of grass between the road and the sidewalk and tomatoes and fava beans flourishing in the flower bed beneath her front windows. It doesn’t matter to her that vegetables are traditionally absent from view from the road. She’s taught me to value functionality in gardening above all else.

So when it comes time to give my beans something to grow up, I don’t waste money purchasing a trellis. Instead I create my own, using materials we have on hand. My father and I keep a collection of sticks, that we collect when they fall from trees during storms; these sticks plus some twine make a perfectly functional trellis.

To make the trellis, plant the beans (or other vine/ creeper) in two long rows. Then place a row of sticks on the outside of each row and one row of sticks between the rows. Then weave the twine around the sticks to create a web, on which the beans can grow. Some people might describe my trellis as trashy or cheap, but I adore its old country, rustic appeal. Besides, when the beans begin to take over, the trellis will disappear into one giant bean bush.

How do you feel about store-bought trellises versus DIY? Do you plant vegetables in your flower beds, or other unusual places?

I tried the pole with strings running to the ground to form bean teepees.  A lot of work, and I could have bought the beans for what I spent on string.

I tried setting up a welded wire fence for the beans to grow on.  The problem is that most fencing is only four or five feet tall, and pole beans grow a lot taller than that.

I tried setting up a fence and then extending the fence posts and adding another two feet of fence above.  Too much work.  Pictured below: Extended height fence worked OK but it was a pain to set up and move

So I came up with a new idea that I’m trying this year.  I asked myself, “How can I get a taller fence without having to extend the fence posts and piece the fencing together?”  Well, I thought, I could cut seven feet of fencing and then turn it up and down instead of sideways.  Good idea, but the fencing is very flexible and wouldn’t stand up straight unless I had seven foot tall posts.  Seven foot T-posts cost about $3.50 each and I needed seven of them.  I can’t see the logic in spending $25 to grow $10 worth of beans, especially when I have a whole pile of old five-foot T-posts that I could use.  Then I had a minor brain-storm.  What if I bent the fencing down the middle at about a sixty degree angle?  This would keep the fence rigid, and because of the zigzag course of the fence I would get more feet of fence into the same length of garden row.

So that’s what I did. I cut six sections of fence seven feet log.  I laid a 2 X 4 down the center of the fence sections, stood on the 2 x 4 and bent the fence up at an angle.  All I had to do to set the fence up was stick a T-post in the ground, use a couple of tie wires to attach a fence section, then put another T-post at the end of the fence section.  The six fence sections and seven T-posts took me about thirty minutes to put up.  Pictured below: Zigzag bean trellis

Now I have about thirty feet of seven foot tall trellis that take up only twenty-four feet of garden row.  I can use this trellis, take it down, move it, and re-build it with very little labor; and it didn’t cost me a dime.  I hope this is the answer that I’ve been looking for.  I guess I’ll know in about three months.  Pictured below: top, Zigzag bean trellis with heirloom pole beans just breaking ground; bottom, Heirloom pole beans one week later

Early Bounty!

Trellises for Beans

I saw this trellis or one very similar at the Fresno Master Gardeners, Garden of the Sun.   I explained it to my hubby and he was able to make me six.  I have attached the instructions for making two.  If you are going to make one you might as well make two because of the left over material.   It cost about $13 for two trellises.  I wanted a trellis that I could use from year to year and be able to easily store it off-season.  I used twine for the vertical strings that the plant will hold onto.  The twine can be just throw into the compost pile with the dead plants.  We used a dowel and or leftover EMT at the top to stabilize the trellises with the opposite row.  When two trellises were side by side we tied them together with wire tie or light weight wire. 

Trellis for cucumbers

Step 4 bent tubing and EMT connector

Step 4 close up of EMT connector

Step 5 Horizontal 5' section 12" from bottom attached with 1 1/2" screws and nuts

Click here  Garden Trellis for instructions.

They don’t look like much; do they?  These pods drying on the vine are my heritage.  Those age-speckled leaves belong to the half-runner beans my grandfather passed on to me.  This tasty bean has been grown in my family, passed down from generation to generation, for over a hundred years.  I was able to grow enough to save seed for the first time this year — and it’s a good thing, too.  No one else in my family is interested or has the time or space to carry on the tradition.  (Although I suspect my sister will be growing it just as soon as she has her own kitchen garden.  I’m saving extra seed for just that eventuality.)

This is not the kind of family heirloom that can sit in a drawer until someone next notices its beauty or value or it is rediscovered by a newcomer too young to take it for granted.  For the members of my family not yet born to be able to appreciate the value of a variety of bean that is well-suited to the local climate, prolific, almost ornamental in its beauty, and, as Granddaddy puts it, “good eatin’,” someone has to keep growing them year after year and saving the seed.  Someone’s heart and hands have to be engaged in that work perpetually, which is perhaps why I now have such a profound appreciation for how rare a treasure this seed is.

Maybe that’s why it tastes so good, that bean.  Generations of diligent and passionate hands have poured their personality and intelligent husbandry into the pods.  Because it is alive, it must continually be nurtured.  Its value can never be forgotten, not for a single growing season, or the chain may be broken, the precious heritage lost forever.  I am taking my place at the end of that long chain, and I have never felt so humble as when I contemplate my responsibility to these tiny living beings.