A Load of Crop
Spring planting yielded unexpected results
Seeds are among Leah’s favorite spring shopping items (along with large blue metal flowers that she insists on placing alongside the real ones). She usually confines herself to wildflowers, sprinkling a few seeds in our front bed, which promptly fail to germinate, either because she loses interest or because our shady front yard isn’t an ideal spot for them.
In April, she nabbed a packet of bean seeds. I ordered some grow bags, intending for her to plant them on our back patio, but she apparently wasn’t satisfied with my rate of response. The promise of Amazon Prime is nothing compared to the urge to plant. One April morning, I noticed a few suspicious comings and goings through our front door, and I spotted the open seed packet on our coffee table. I asked my husband whether he thought our firstborn had been out front, planting bean seeds?
He assured me there was probably nothing to worry about. “I don’t think she got them below the mulch layer.“ And I also thought to myself that beans probably need a lot more sun than our front flower bed gets.
It turns out that beans are resilient, or that Leah might be a little more skilled at planting than we thought. For what to my disbelieving eyes should appear a few weeks later, as Cookie and I set off for a walk, but a trio of sprouting bean plants (all in the vicinity of the blue flower, poised to begin a new life as a trellis). My dilemma quickly became whether to relocate these quirky tributes to suburban farming to a more appropriate location, or to nurture the weird experiment all the way through the growing season.
Two of the surprise plants, next to the flowers I intended to grow and the blue metal behemoth Leah insisted should be there too.
In a not-at-all stunning development, those who heard this tale were overwhelmingly in favor of egging Leah on. The joke is, of course, on me, because the architect of this project is the same person who spent all of high school avoiding horticulture classes as much as possible. Much like the parents who give in to the pleas for a puppy, I am fully aware that the person in charge of beanstalk survival is me.
Meanwhile Leah’s assurance that she plans to consume her crops might not amount to a hill of … well .. beans.