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"I can't pick any more beans! I hate the garden as much as you love it!"
Honey fairly shouted those words as she came in the back door of Col. Peggy and Gen. Doc's house. They and I were there, and so was Johnson, Gen. Doc's visiting grandson. It was his first time to meet Honey. I'm sure he'll remember her.
My wife was more than unhappy. She was wringing wet from sweat, sick to her stomach from heat and exhausted after 90 minutes of picking green beans on a muggy, sticky-hot August day.
"I got over two drywall buckets of beans and I didn't even get to the end of the row," she fumed. "I quit when I got to the end of the carpet. I'm not picking in mud."
There's a lot to unpack before you can completely understand Honey's uncharacteristic outburst.
First, she rarely sweats. I start sweating when I get out of bed; I go through three or four work shirts on these hot, humid summer days. But for her to sweat enough for her shirt to be soaked and her hair to be stuck to her head and neck in little wet ringlets, she had to be really, really overheated. (The seven-foot-tall fence with trellised pole bean vines was wet from dew, so that partly accounts for her being drenched.)
Second, drywall buckets hold five gallons, so she had picked over 10 gallons of green beans. That's a lot of picking, considering the conditions.
Third, Honey is a stickler when it comes to picking a row clean. When it's your turn to pick, if you wish to earn her disdain, don't finish the row, or miss a lot of beans. For her to quit before the end of a row is almost unthinkable.
FOURTH, when she said she quit at the end of the carpet, she was speaking literally. I carpeted the cucumbers and both sides of the bean row this year, laying down three-foot-wide strips of junk carpet. Some of the carpet, notably a large swath in Harvest Gold color (which tells you how old it is) was saved for me by workers at the county recycling center, adjacent to our farm on Gas Valley Road. They thought it a little puzzling, but they did it anyway. (I have a habit of bringing back more from the dump than I take. People throw away a lot of good stuff.)
Carpet is great mulch, letting water go through but blocking weeds and keeping shoes from getting muddy. I thought of this trick just this year and it has been wonderful, besides being environmentally friendly. I save something from the landfill and our shoes stay clean, too.
Fifth (I hope this numbering thing is helpful), Honey will be stressed anyway until she is certain she has put up enough green beans and sweet corn to serve at the wedding reception for our son Worshrag and his intended, Busy Bee, which is only two weeks away.
The caterer is providing two meat dishes and two sides, and at Honey's request has agreed also to serve two additional sides from the bounty of our garden. Honey, being the resourceful person she is, got on the internet and found a formula for calculating the volume of vegetable dishes each person at a wedding reception is likely to consume. To be safe, she then increased that calculation by a factor of 30 percent to arrive at total of seven gallons of beans and seven gallons of corn.
Sixth, Honey is still burnt out from putting up more than 400 quarts of garden produce last summer, some by freezing, some by canning. She feels trapped by the garden, to put it bluntly, chained to the kitchen and unable to enjoy summer concerts, trips, visits, relaxation, and so on. Even though serving our own corn and green beans was her idea, and thus increased her workload, she sees another summer slipping away. She made me promise that next year the garden will be much, much smaller and we will have more fun.
SEVENTH, and there really isn't a seventh, but the numbering thing has gotten out of hand and I need to wrap this up, so let's say that seventh is the sum of all those things crashing down on my poor wife and precipitating her green bean meltdown.
As a loving husband, my reaction was to go to the garden and pick another five gallons of beans for her to break, blanch and freeze. Honey put up 26 quarts of beans that day, and since has gone a gallon over the seven-gallon goal she set for herself.
I also found more old carpet and laid it to the end of the bean row.
When people stop by the garden, I proudly show it to them and explain, "My wife won't pick beans unless she can stand on carpet."
This weekend we'll start putting up the corn. The corn rows are not carpeted, but I pick that.