Full Of Beans

Back during the Summer of Woodstock I was working on a farm. There were fields of corn, cabbage, tomatoes, squash and peppers. These crops were easy to harvest because one could detect the ripeness by the size and color. The corn was planted ten rows every week so that we could harvest through out the summer. Every week ten more rows were ready to be picked. If the first ear was ready, they were all ready in that ten row plot.

A difficult plant to harvest were the green beans. First the color of the beans was the same color as the leafs and stems of the plant. To make it even worse the farmer planted a bush variety and it was sometimes hard finding the fruit from above.

I was harvesting our pole beans yesterday and I wondered why the farmer planted bush beans. Pole beans are much more efficient. By giving them something to grow on the plants easily produce 10 times what the bush varieties produce. The only problem with ours is that we grow them on three sticks fastened together like a teepee so it is a very three dimensional entity. You can pick and pick and just when you think you've picked it clean, you look at it from another direction and there are a whole bunch you've missed. Keep picking...keep picking...