“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” ~Marcus Tullius Cicero
It’s green bean time in our garden. I grow stick beans. Those are beans that you have to supply something for the vines to grow up onto. We use an overhead wire strung between wooden posts and then twine strings attached to the wire and to individual wires we stick in the ground. This year and the last couple of years the vines have gone crazy and grown to the top of the strings and then overflowed to fall back toward the ground. Doesn’t make picking those beans easy, but I rummage around in the vines until I get beans.
We’ve given over most of the garden to my son who lives near us since he has a family to feed and Darrell and I don’t need as much as we did when the kids were home. His wife likes Tenderette bunch beans. They grow in bushes low to the ground. In the picture, my granddaughter is joining in the picking back a few years ago before she was really old enough to help. Back then, it was fun. Tonight I helped them pick their rows of beans. The girl in the picture is now old enough to be more help although she’s still young. She was a willing worker if a bit slow and easily distracted from the task at hand.
Her sister, who is three years older at 14 now and thus old enough to be a better help, wasn’t very happy about picking beans. She made a firm statement while we were picking that she was NOT going to have a garden when she got older and on her own. She was going to buy her beans at the store. Her father reminded her that the beans wouldn’t taste as good, but she said she didn’t care. They would taste good enough. I suggested that she might marry someone who wanted to raise a garden. She was very emphatic in declaring that if he wanted a garden, HE could do all the work. Picking beans made her back hurt.
“What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.” ~Charles Dudley Warner
And so it does. Even her young back, I suppose. I could have told her she should have an old granny back like mine. But I didn’t. I simply smiled and wondered if when she did get older and was on her own if she would change her mind.
“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.” ~Alfred Austin
For me, I never ever thought about not having a garden. A garden was simply something you planted in the spring and harvested all through the summer. A person should raise the food she needed. A person should preserve whatever she could from that garden whether by canning or freezing to have the food from her garden last all through the year. My mother had a garden. My grandmothers had gardens. I’m sure my great grandmothers and on back through the years all had gardens. While gardens are work, there is something so fulfilling in cooking and eating food you’ve grown yourself. Plus, as my son told his daughter, it tastes better than what you can buy at the store. And what a gift my son has given his children to participate in that planting and growing and harvesting just as I was given that same gift when I was young.
In my Appalachian stories, the gardens are called “sass patches” and the produce “sass.” Not sure where that comes from but it added to the flavor of my stories. In An Appalachian Summer, I have Piper helping one of the mountain women pick beans, something she’d never done. It gave her time to connect with nature and talk about the Lord to the older woman.
I’ve been helping my son and his kids pick the beans for several years. The two older kids are better pickers than these younger ones, but they are off to college now. One year when my son was sick, the older daughter and I picked three bushels of beans in one afternoon. We definitely needed that cast-iron back with the hinge that day.
But the best part of picking the beans has been the chance to hear the kids talk about books and plays and songs. That always made the picking go better. I’m sure when I used to help my mother pick beans we talked about things too. Working together opens up new ways to connect, and whether the kids wanted to pick or not, they did and we talked and they went home with a bushel and a half of beans. Tomorrow they’ll be snapping those beans and getting them ready for their mother to can. It will be a blessing for them even though they may not realize it now. Someday they will. And who knows? That girl so determined to never have a garden might change her mind and bring me some beans out of her garden when I get too old to raise my own.
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” ~May Sarton
Are you a garderner? Raising vegetables for your table or beautifying your world with flowers? What do you like best about gardening?