Ok, admitedly, you can’t grow all things well. It seems that everyone has a speciality. Mine is tomatoes, or broccoli maybe, but certainly not beans. I have been harvesting my pole & bush beans for about 3 weeks now and it looks like they are just about done. I’ve gotten perhaps enough for a family of 6 to eat at a single meal. And not all harvested at once. Perhaps a handfull a day, at best. Plus, there were wild temperature fluctuations….two nights of near freezing, and daytime record highs, that caused an uncontrollable case of powdery mildew, which ultimately is causing the premature demise of the entire bean crop. There was the huge attraction of the mice and birds to the bean seeds, and Itty was useless as a deterrant, in fact, she enjoyed digging the seeds up herself. Traitor. Do I sound bitter? It’ll take a couple of weeks for the sting of this defeat to melt into a distant memory. Meanwhile, perhaps there are lessons to be learned here. For one, I don’t usually have disease as a foe, so the experience of dealing with powdery mildew was a good thing to learn. (That, spraying the beans three days in a row will knock it out before it becomes a big problem.) And then, there is always the big one….preparing the soil. This is usually where I beat the battles before they begin. Stronger plants, more disease resistance, and larger yields can all be traced back to good dirt. The last thing I’m gleaning from my bean experience is the silver lining…..even if the bean crop was a failure, beans still fix nitrogen in the soil, so the planting that follows my failed crop next spring will be much better off because the beans grew there.
ps. I will try beans again, but not until I’m in a happier place.