Monday, May 14, 2012

The bean cube

My dad brought us some beans from his little town in Spain, and I was so thrilled to plant them at home that I had them on the ground by March 15th. It helped that this was a very mild winter, that Daniel hand-watered them all by himself, and that it rained for a couple of days after planting them. Using a mixture of homemade compost and Miracle Grow soil on the top didn't hurt either. By the end of the week we had a bed full of beans!



Since we knew that these were pole beans, I asked Craig to help me by building a support trellis for the beans. My dad thought that we were crazy, and that a few sticks on the ground would suffice, but it is clear that my dad has not been around our garden enough :) A few days later Craig had a three-dimensional trellis made of scrap wood and twine all in place. The beans loved it! The vertical spaces were taken over first, and then the horizontal ones. As of right now, just two months later, we have a solid cube of beans in our garden. It looks like this:
The front of the bean cube has more leaves than the back, mostly due to sun issues, but all the vines are now covered with bean pods.
I can't wait for all the pods to get fat and filled with beans. There is nothing quite like fresh beans, and these historied beans should taste all that much better!