Beans, Beans, and no more Beans...

The first vegetable seeds I planted were bush beans.  A nice mixture of green, yellow, and purple beans came in the little package of seeds that my Mom handed me one weekend.  I read the instructions and planted a row of seeds in a sunny spot behind the herb garden.  The seeds germinated quickly, and within a week I could see little bean sprouts poking through the soil.  By the beginning of summer we had a row of healthy, tall bean sprouts and we were harvesting a nice handful of beans every week or so.  Success!  Or so it seemed...  

Fast forward to the waning weeks of summer and now my bush beans look rather peaked.  Something has nibbled on their leaves, and some of the little bean sprouts are leafless.  Naked little bean sprouts trying their hardest to tough it out in the dog days of summer.  Perhaps this makes me seem shallow, but the tired, leafless bean sprouts just don't flatter my garden.  I know, I know, it's not about how we look... but I really liked looking at their fresh green leaves and little bean blossoms.  My poor beans are like all those out of work, over-the-hill actresses that Hollywood wants to discard!  I digress...  

The thing is, I'm attached to these bean plants.  They were my first real taste of gardening success!  And so now I'm on a mission to save them.   This morning when I went out to pick the beans while I enjoyed my coffee I noticed that the bean plants seem to be producing mainly on the bottom part of the sprouts.  This observation made me wonder if perhaps I could make my plants look better AND increase their yields simply by cutting them back.  So I turned to my trusty research friend the internet and did a search on cutting back bush beans.  Low and behold I was right!  Simply by cutting off the parts of the sprouts that are past their prime, I will divert more energy to the newer parts of the plants and therefore get a larger crop for a longer period of time.  

So that will be this weeks project.  And if all else fails, I can always plants another batch of seed to get me through until Autumn.  Thank goodness for that warm Southern California weather!

In the Beginning... there were weeds

Lately I've been kicking myself for not taking any "before" pictures of my garden just so I could place them next to all the "after" pictures like they do in those Weight Watchers commercials. That being said, I guess I'll have to rely on that descriptive writing ability I learned in all those high school English classes.  Basically, the garden was a 600 square space filled with partially dead grass, some extremely old rose bushes, overgrown bouganvilla and camelia bushes, and a ton of weeds.  Weeds as far as the eye could see.  It was so bad I didn't even want to spend time in my backyard, not even when it was just too damn hot to be inside our un-air conditioned bungalow.  The thought of doing something about the garden disaster was just too overwhelming and, truthfully, I didn't have a great motivation for taking on such a monstrous project.  And then, thanks to a dear friend's impending nuptials and a promised bridal shower... I was faced with having to get my "it would look better outside of a trailer home" backyard ready to party in 8 months.  So, like any smart Jewish girl... I enlisted the help of my Mother.

I knew there was no way I could do it myself, and I didn't even know how to start!  Thankfully, Mom was thrilled to be put to work.  I don't think that she realized at the time just how hard she would end up working.   

Now, I've spent my entire adult life living in cities.  Oh sure, I grew plants and herbs on the fire escape of my New York formerly-a-tenement apartment and I grew the requisite potted cactus plant on the patio of my hideously ugly Los Angeles apartment building, but I had never conquered an entire GARDEN!  Or grown anything from seed for that matter.  So this is not something that I've ever done before.  In fact, I had never even purchased a seed packet until my Mother started throwing them in the basket while proclaiming they were "less expensive than color spots!"  And so the journey began.

Seven months later, I now have a garden that I want to spend time in.  The grass is green, the roses are rehabbed, and I have flowers galore.  I'm even growing vegetables!  Yes, somewhere in the middle of it all my Mother convinced me to "go green" and grow my own vegetables.  I don't think it was her intention to turn our garden into a backyard produce stand (she said it would be "so much fun!" to grow vegetables) but she did, and I'm glad I let her talk me into all those little veggie seed packets.  Even my born and raised in New York City husband is excited to pick zucchini from the backyard!

Yes, gardening is hard work and it can be frustrating when plants die, or seeds don't come up or the cat craps on the lawn, but ultimately I find it to be a really great counterpoint to the craziness that is life in a fast-paced urban environment.

I think the best advice I've ever heard that applies to both my garden and my life comes courtesy of a family friend: "If the grass looks greener on the other side... you might want to fertilize".