This Year's Gardens: Part 11

 This year's gardens continue. I just this morning started clearing out the Hej garden to replant zucchini in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, we get a crop. I have had a month of more medical appointments than I want (August has contained eight—count 'em! Eight!—counting the two this coming week) and they take a toll on my durability, so I suspect it will next weekend before the Hej is cleared, tilled again, and planted. That task aside, I continue to eat tomatoes (Oh, joy! Rapture!) and think about doing yet another batch of pesto with the late August basil. 

This weekend, however, I was reminded again (always) of how gardens never fail to delight and amuse. This year's gardens are no exception.

Delight #1: Any other summer, the lettuce is usually burnt out by mid-July due to heat and sun. Oh, there are a few straggly bits here and there, and sometimes a volunteer or two will pop up in the fall once things cool down, but lettuce is NOT a summer crop around here.

Until this year. The lettuce beds are going strong and we are in the third week of August. We have been picking and eating the Black Seeded Simpson since early July (maybe late June) and now are adding the Butter Crunch to the salad bowl as well. Fresh-picked lettuce is so delicious that I told Warren I am not sure I can return to eating store-bought lettuce when the season is over. I have not bought tomatoes from a grocery store for years because of the qualitative difference; I wonder if lettuce will be the same. 

I remind myself that back in my youth, lettuce out of season was something you did not see in our local grocery stores. Can we go without lettuce-based salads for several months? Hmmn.

Delight #2: Still in the lettuce bed, but this is a totally unexpected joy. Because the lettuce burns out so early, I have never seen it go to seed. Ever. I could not even visualize a lettuce plant going to seed. 

Until this year. The Black Seeded Simpson has been so hearty and so prolific that it has started to flower. I nipped off a number of the flowering heads to prolong the lettuce, but some I am letting go to full flower. 

A flowering lettuce plant is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. 

Look how delicate those flowers are.

I did not note in my gardening book anything more than the names and locations of the lettuce beds in my garden, but from what I can find online from checking a number of seed companies, Black Seeded Simpson is a heritage lettuce, which means they will grow from saved seed. I am tempted to harvest some of the seeds and hold them for next year.

Amusement of the summer (as in "the joke is on me"): the Cherokee Trail of Tears black pole beans. Not the product; these beans are prolific! No, it is my ignorance in realizing how these beans (and maybe all pole beans) take care of themselves when it comes to drying. I went out to pick more of them today and realized about three bean pods into the harvest that they have been drying themselves. All I need to do was pick them and pop the pods open. Out roll those beautiful beans. 

"Why have you been working so hard, April? We know what we are doing."

My beans picked last week were fine; I dried them for soup when the weather changes. Today's beans will join those, but right now today's beans are laughing at me, saying "Duh, April. You don't know beans about beans." 

As this realization hit me (the work being done by the sun and the beans themselves), I thought back to my past experiences with beans. There were always beans in my grandparents' garden; Grandma Nelson canned green beans by the quart. My parents also grew beans and Mom canned as well. Heck, even I grew and canned beans. But they were bush beans, always something in what I will call the "green bean" family, and you ate them fresh or canned them, period. I have no memories, even stories passed down, of anyone growing pole beans (which can also be eaten fresh). I do not remember seeing poles or structures for them in any of the gardens. I certainly do not have any memories of anyone (and this would have been on my dad's side of the family, as they were the ones whose gardens I knew growing up) drying beans. 

But now I know. 

A phrase several of my medical providers have been using lately is "knowledge is power, " referring to some of the testing I have been going through. I am going to steal that phrase and apply it to my beans: Knowledge IS power, and the power here is not working so darn hard for the same outcome! 

Today's haul