I love September in the garden here. The crystal clear blue skies, the clean air, the long afternoon shadows. It’s warm and dry; it's exactly the kind of weather I long for in May and June after an abundance of chilly rain. And even though I love fall, I bask in the lasting September warmth, like a cat stretched out in the sun.
The garden becomes something different for us in September. It’s always a sort of playground for the kids, but as our summer ends and the gorgeous dry weather stretches out. It’s less about what’s growing and more about spiders and wicked looking webs spun all over the yard.
It's about using the long heavy dead sunflower stalks as swords and finding seeds to play with.
It’s about garden clean-up, and lingering on the lawn, and savoring every single last drop of summer because we know we will soon be in for a long chilly wet spell.
The last few years we’ve planted beans in the garden. I like how easy they are for the kids to plant and watch grow, and my brother sends the kids cool bean seeds for their birthdays in April every year. Last year he sent Rattlesnake beans and this year it was a package with green, yellow and purple bean seeds. We planted some of both in the beds this year.
There’s this sense of almost instant gratification in planting beans for the kids. And they are super low maintenance. When the do sprout, which is fairly quickly, they are big hearty sprouts and they grow quickly. Give the pole or climbing beans a bit of tepee or trellis to climb and they are off!
But here’s the thing, I don’t really like beans. I mean spicy pickled beans in a fabulous Bloody Mary, yes please. Or sautéed in brown butter with garlic, okay fine, but beans, as I’m sure most of you know, produce a lot, way more than I care to eat.
Let’s just say they aren’t up there at the top of my list like home grown tomatoes or broccoli.
But guess who likes them? Jasper Ohlin, the vegetable hater. Not only does he like them, but he actually requests them at meals when I make the kids eat vegetables. And last week, we were getting ready to go pick Greg up from work and Jasper asked if he could take some green beans with him as a snack in the car.
Who took my child and replaced him with this impostor?? I guess I'm glad we have all these beans growing!
