Two Feet in the Dirt

Last week’s mild heat wave gave new life to the summer crops and forced me to withdraw from my “no more canning” stance. I simply couldn’t help but put up another round of pickled roasted peppers. Additionally, we’ve seen a new influx of cherry and slicing tomatoes, which are now once again covering much of our kitchen counters. But the real beneficiary of the warm weather was the string beans. I harvested almost 3 pounds in one day over the weekend and then another pound two days later!

Harvesting beans even this far into the fall is something new for me. At the farm I managed until this year, we had a serious problem with Mexican bean beetles. These bugs start out as clusters of yellow eggs on the leaves of the bean plant and then go through various forms of fuzzy yellow larval stages before reaching their adult form. Round and pale-yellow with black dots, these beetles reproduce like mad and can annihilate even a large patch of beans in days. Hard-bodied insects like these are always more difficult to manage with organic techniques and more ethically questionable as the organic pesticides that work against them tend to be broad-spectrum, meaning they will also kill other insects like lady bugs, spiders, and bees that you want to stay alive. Therefore, I primarily managed for bean beetles by rotating the beans to different beds each year and ripping the plants out as soon as the beetles really took hold. As a result, by late August, the beans were usually gone.

In contrast, this year I’m growing in a space that has never (to my knowledge) had anything but grass growing in it, let alone bean plants. As a result, Mexican bean beetles never made an appearance and the bean plants are still growing strong! I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about this. As I’ve mentioned before, I have an unabashed aversion to harvesting beans. I’m honestly not even sure why I dislike bean harvesting so much. It’s not much more tedious or more frequent than what is required for tomatoes, but something about harvesting beans drives me up a wall. I just grin and bear it, though, knowing that the pleasure of getting to enjoy string beans this far into September more than makes up for the pain!