After a summer during which I didn’t have to water the garden once because it rained every few days, the faucet has been turned off. We’ve been dry since the last week of August. Oh we had thunder and rain yesterday afternoon, but while the thunder rumbled for nearly half an hour, the rain fell for only ten minutes, barely enough to wet the top of the soil. Our rain barrels are empty and we are using gray water from the house—from the dehumidifier, air conditioner, shower, and dishwater–to keep the garden hydrated.

I am grateful the dry has come at the end of the growing season rather than the beginning or middle. The butternuts and pumpkins are working on ripening, we are still getting jalapeños and cayenne peppers. It looks like I will get a second zucchini after all, picked at normal size to eat fresh. And, I am still picking tomatoes and green beans every evening. With the water diet, the tomatoes are much smaller than they were in July. The beans, they just keep going. So many beans this year! I think I mentioned we fermented four quarts of green beans. They came out great! Crunchy with a slightly sour bite, sort of like pickles. Really pleased with them. And we still have a huge bag of fresh frozen beans in the freezer. Plus, we eat them fresh from the garden too. We will happily be eating green beans for sometime to come.

Speaking of beans, the dry weather has been good for picking the shelling beans. From saved seed I grew Iroquois skunk beans, a prolific black and white speckled pole bean, and Holstein black-eyed peas, also black and white. I apparently have a thing for black and white beans! Heh.

Also from saved seeds I grew brown resilient beans. These bush beans were bred by Carole Deppe, author of some fantastic gardening books as well as a plant breeder. I grew these for the first time last year. My seed packet came with maybe 15 seeds in it. I planted them all. Then we had a bad drought, but the beans still were doing pretty well. And then a rabbit invaded and ate half the bean plants. But some of them actually came back and still produced beans. So these definitely are resilient! Still, I didn’t get enough beans to actually eat, I saved them all for seeding this year. And once again they did great, especially without any drought. But some of them were eaten by a rabbit, again.

Rabbits seem to like bush beans quite a lot. The rabbit ate all of the bush green beans down to nubs. And with half of the resilient beans chewed down I thought, I’m done with bush beans. But the resilient beans recovered, and some of them are still producing beans. When the pods began to dry and I began picking them I discovered the medium to dark brown beans I saved from last year produced a variety of colors this year. I’ve got dark and light brown, tan, yellow, white, and black beans. This is because of all the crossings Deppe did to get the brown beans. They are not truly reverting, but they are showing their widely various genetics, which is what makes them so resilient. The color variety has made me want to grow them again just to see what happens next year. Plus, in spite of the rabbit, they were really productive.

First time beans in the garden were Hidasta Red, Succotash, and lima. The Hidasta red is a pole bean and was moderately productive with its pretty red beans. I saved some to try again next year. The succotash beans are dark purple and look like big corn kernals. The story is that these pole beans were grown by the Narragansett peoples in what is now Rhode Island and were part of a succotash vegetable dish served at the first Thanksgiving. This story is a bunch of baloney, but most of the seed catalogs repeat it. Nonetheless, it is a pretty bean. The vines began the season with lots of pods but it seems someone came along and ate most of them before they got dry to pick. Perhaps this indicates how delicious they are? I was able to get enough to save seed for next year and to have a bit leftover to eat. They will need to be combined with other beans since there is not enough to make a whole meal of them.

And then there are the lima beans. I am not sure what variety is actually growing. I planted Jackson Wonder and the squirrels came along and dug them all up. Then I planted more. Squirrels. Then I planted more and many of them actually sprouted, but I’m not sure they were Jackson Wonder because I have a packet of limas from two years ago called speckled calico in my seed box too. The beans I am picking are speckled like the calico beans but small like the Jackson Wonder. Some of them are almost black and some are mostly white with brown speckles. They match neither the Jackson nor the calico. They vined, but not like the pole bean description of the calico. So perhaps they are Jackson and like the brown resilient beans are just showing their genetic variety? Or maybe I have both calico and Jackson and they crossed? Regardless, I completely neglected these plants all summer and in spite of my neglect they are still providing beans. I have saved some for next year, and since they are at least semi-vining, I will plant them with the shelling peas because the beans will take over about the time the peas are done. Efficient use of space!

I also grow scarlet runner beans from seeds I’ve saved. They are a long season bean and I grow them mostly for their pretty red flowers. Still, they did well this year and are covered in big, still green pods. I’ll have enough seed to save and some left to eat. The beans are huge and a swirling purple/pink/tan color. Perhaps they will go well with the succotash beans?

The garden, and I, love growing beans. I particularly love heirloom pole beans with beautiful colors or patterns. If you have a favorite bean you think I might be interested in trying, please let me know about it!

Today is the Autumn Equinox, a day of balance between light and dark before we tip over into darkness for the next few months. The Harvest Moon was also full last week. Did you see it? It was stunning! I didn’t see the partial eclipse though. A friend of mine did and she described the moon looking like it had a toupée. James made our celebratory Harvest Moonpies–two chocolate cookies with almond cream in the middle and then the whole thing covered in a chocolate shell. It’s a good thing the Harvest Moon and Autumn Equinox only come around once a year!

Reading

• Book: Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky. What a strange and delightful short novel this is! It is the story of Patrik, who rarely calls himself Patrik but “The Patient.” Patrik was invited to a conference to present a paper on Celan but he can’t decide if he wants to go. The story is filled with literary references especially about Celan, a poet I have not read but now really want to and have requested from the library one of his books mentioned in the novel. Patrik also has a crush on an opera singer, so there are lots of musical references too. The story is told from the third person mostly, but will slyly switch to first person sometimes and then back to third person. But even in the first person, Patrik will sometimes talk about himself in the third person. I know that makes it sound confusing but it isn’t. The best part of this book is how aphoristic it often is. You might think this would get really annoying, but it doesn’t. It is played to perfection.
• Article: The Agitator by Kelli Korduck. The article is about Sylvia Federici, Feminist, Marxist, activist, academic, her career and books and what the cost of her activism has been for her career.
• Article: The Right Wants Us to Submit to Nihilism. Here Is Where I’m Searching for Hope, by Lewis Raven Wallace. If the political climate has got you down, maybe this article will help you see that there is hope.
• Articles: Fascism vs Totalitarianism & Authoritarianism and Difference Between Authoritarianism and Fascism. These terms are tossed about these days without any definitions so they feel squishy and shifty and I don’t think the people using them sometimes actually know what they mean. So I searched out explanations and the two linked articles are the best, clearest ones I found. As one of them mentions, precision of definitions is important!
• E-book: The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War by John Paul Lederach. I haven’t finished this book, it’s a little over 100 pages and is a free, downloadable e-book on Lederach’s website. He is an international mediator who has worked in conflicts in Northern Ireland, Nepal, Somalia Nicaragua and other places. The guide focuses on polarization and political violence in the United States. Each short chapter illustrates a different toxic dynamic and offers examples and suggestions for how to break the pattern. This could be a potentially useful little book in the coming months. Not that there is going to be a civil war, but because of the potential for violence.

Quote

“Nature has taught me so much about moving with the seasons, that we need to honor times of harvest and times of rest. That the frenetic pace of doing, doing, doing without being present with each other and the season we are in, what is happening around us, is unnatural and counter to life.”

~Brenda Salgado

Listening

• Podcast: Backlisted, Season 3 Prequel. This is a new to me podcast that focuses on older books. This is the first episode of their new season. Since they are returning from summer hiatus, they talk about what they read over the summer and not all the books are older ones. One of them that sounds especially interesting is The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith, a history of childhood reading, meaning literature for children but also the invention of childhood and books for children and all our expectations around what that is.

Watching

• Series: Only Murders in the Building, Season 4. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. Some of it is getting a little old, but the three have great chemistry so the fun outweighs the meh.

James’s Kitchen Witchery

In addition to the Harvest Moonpies, James used fresh jalapeños and cayenne peppers from the garden to make hot sauce as well as some of our fermented cherry tomatoes to make a spicy ketchup. He added some garlic and onion (also from the garden) to the hot sauce to tone it down a bit because the cayennes are a bit too hot. It came out moderately spicy with a nice sweet smokey flavor. Also, here’s a tip: if you are working with hot peppers like cayenne, wear gloves. James did not and every little scratch and nick on his hands were burning by the time he was done.