The Greens of August

In our 600-square-foot vegetable garden this year we are growing corn, okra, lettuce, chard, dill, carrots, summer squash, eight kinds of tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, basil, leeks, beets, spinach, amaranth…. and green beans.

I have no argument with the first fifteen items on the list. There is nothing as flavorful as sweet corn eaten minutes after it was picked or a salad topped with tomatoes still warm from the vine. These are the reasons we garden. Even when there is excess (think zucchini), there are neighbors with whom to share the bounty or, if your friends begin avoiding you because they know you come bearing suitcases full of the stuff, you can foist the surplus on people who unsuspectingly leave their car windows rolled down in parking lots. We have disposed of zucchini in exactly that fashion on more than one occasion.

This is one day's haul of green beans
from our vegetable garden

But zucchini is a vegetable that must be eaten fresh. No one would ever think of canning or freezing summer squash because they’d find nothing but mush when they sampled it in January. Not so green beans. Green beans have pretty much the same taste and texture whether they’re eaten fresh or frozen.

For reasons I cannot fathom, this year Betty planted two ‘wide rows’ and one ‘standard’ row of green beans, with the idea that we’d freeze what we didn’t immediately eat. She apparently used varieties with names like ‘Maxi-Yield’ and ‘Garden-Glut’ because we began getting green beans at the beginning of July and are now picking – and I promise I am not making this up –five pounds or more of beans from of the garden every other day.

The first week was wonderful. The yield was maybe 20 or 30 long, luscious beans a day, perhaps ten minutes worth of picking in the cool late afternoon. Once home, we pinched off the ends, threw them in a dish, steamed them for three minutes and we had fresh, delicious green beans; high in vitamins and good for us to boot.

Then the yield bounced up to about 60 green beans a day. Fifteen minutes of picking and ten minutes of snipping ends. OK, we cooked half and froze half (two minutes in boiling water, then rinse under cold water to stop the cooking, arrange the beans on a tray, stick them in the freezer for an hour, then bag them and return them to the freezer until needed). I could cope with that.  One reason is that last year our green bean season lasted just two weeks.  Then, Mexican bean beetles discovered the garden and began chomping on everything in sight.  Seemingly overnight, the leaves were reduced to skeletons and the beans were half-eaten by voracious beetles.  But not this year:  Betty covered the beans with floating row covers in early June and the bean beetles have been effectively thwarted.  The beans, which are self-pollinating, thrive under the row covers.  Worse, the second double row is within a week of going into production.

This is what our green bean patch
looked like last year after the Mexican
bean beetles got through with it.

Soon we will be spending half an hour stooped over picking under a blazing sun with suffocating August humidity, pinching ends for another 45 minutes, and then lining up green beans on trays for half an hour. First, it was one double-decked tray of beans to blanch and freeze and then two double-decked trays. Did I mention we are running out of space in our freezer?

Dealing with the excess will require ingenuity. Fortunately, our new neighbors on one side are vegetarians, and one of them is a growing teenage boy.  Unfortunately, the paterfamilias of our now-year-old neighbors on the other side is a man whose disdain for vegetables in general (the exception is zucchini) is well known.  I will slip our surplus green beans to his wife and their two adorable children via some Vegan version of the Underground Railroad.

The last row of green beans, a standard-width one, was planted late, intended for September production, and had poor germination. It is currently surrounded by squares of corn and I intend to leave up that corn until the last ear is plucked.  With luck, by the time the green bean plants should be flowering, they’ll instead be shivering under cooling September nights. They will not be missed.

There is joy in seeing plants first emerging from the ground in May and early June. Alas, the mind does not contemplate the work that will be involved when, as in the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, the green beans keep maturing by the hundreds every day, demanding to be picked. The great gardening guru Roger Swain calls one of the joys of summer the ‘wretched excess’ from the garden. This July and August, being a grower of green beans makes it easy to understand the ‘wretched’ part of that statement.

Why Vegetable Gardeners Are Optimists

Vegetable gardeners are optimists.  They have to be because, otherwise, they’d never lift a hoe again after they saw their first tomato hornworm.  

We have a plot at a community vegetable garden in our town.  It’s a sunny, 1200-square-foot space that has some of the richest soil in New England.  Because we also ‘run’ the garden (we thought we were joining a committee but it turned out no one else was on it), we field all the questions and problems from our fifty-plus fellow gardeners.  As you read on, please keep in mind that this is a good year for vegetable gardening.

This is a cucumber beetle.  It can make
a plant disappear overnight.

·         Everyone is coping with an infestation of cucumber beetles.  The comments started in mid-May that cucumber vine leaves had little holes in them.  By mid-June, plants were disappearing overnight.  By now, any squash, cucumber, or soybean plant that isn’t being grown under a row cover is an endangered species.

·         Also, the first of the Mexican bean beetles have been spotted.  This charming pest chomps on green beans and anything that looks like a green bean (the bugs are apparently far-sighted), including mung beans, soybeans and alfalfa.  You know you have a Mexican bean beetle infestation because, one day, you come out to your garden and all you have are skeletons of leaves.  Again, row covers are the lone salvation unless you’re not averse to dowsing your vegetables with exceedingly non-organic bug killers.

And this is a squash borer.  One of
the nastiest pests in the garden.

·         Yesterday, someone asked Betty about the cute little orange and gray moths on her squash plants.  Betty patiently explained that they are the adult manifestations of Melitta curcurbitae, otherwise known as the squash vine borer.  When two adults get together and make whoopee, they’ll lay a mass of eggs under a summer or winter squash vine.  Two few weeks later, there go the zucchini, butternut squash, and melons.
·         Two weeks ago, it was reported that a nemesis called late blight had been found as close as Pennsylvania.  Late blight, which is endemic in the South, can kill a tomato plant in a few days.  This morning, I learned that it has been spotted in two towns less than ten miles away.  There is no 'cure' for late blight.  If the fungus spores reach our garden, our tomatoes are goners.

Because of the threat of these pests, our garden this year looks like a Red Cross aid station.  White row covers shield our green beans, zucchini, yellow squash and a couple of other things that have been cloaked so long that I’ve forgotten what’s underneath them.

Our floating row covers keep susceptible vegetables safe
from pests.  It also makes our garden look like a Red
Cross first aid station.

Yet, despite the alarming reports noted above, this is turning out to be a great year for vegetables.  Not just ‘knee-high by the Fourth of July’, our early corn already shows tassels and we’ll likely pick our first ears before the end of July.  The cooler-than-normal May and June means that our lettuce and arugula haven’t bolted and are producing prolifically.  Our peas produce pods by the gazillion and we’ve pulled beets that have reached the size of softballs without turning woody.  Our basil is dark green and already redolent of the citral that gives it that wonderful scent.  Rainfall has been well-spaced and the heat blasts have been of short duration.

Of course, all of this can change overnight.  Our ten tomato plants look perfect right now, but Late Blight – a scourge that wiped out virtually the entire Northeast tomato crop in 2010 – has been found as close as Pennsylvania.  Fungus could discover the basil and corn borers could lay waste to our crop.

The only way to keep your sanity when you grow vegetables is to assume the best.  We plant, we weed, we pick off the bad bugs, we water and we fertilize.  We cross our fingers and imagine the taste of that first tomato and fresh-picked sweet corn.  Gardeners count their wins, not their losses.