The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  After the lot of them had consumed over five dollars of bean seed, I wasn’t keen on buying more seed packets. But then, standing at the organic bulk bins at the co-op, I stared at the lovely array of beans ready to be made into stews. These beans were much less expensive than the packets I bought at the nursery. Beans are beans, right? They were organic and so had not been sprayed with any inhibitory hormones. At a fraction of the cost, I could risk replanting with these.

  I bought a small amount of organic cranberry beans, pinto beans, and turtle beans. Crossing my fingers, I went home, chose a bed away from the burgeoning sow bug metropolis, and planted the beans.

  All three types sprouted without any problem, grew like a dream, and produced a lot of bean pods. When the pods dried, I picked them and laid them in a single layer on a tray in the house for a day or so to make sure they were well dehydrated. Many of the beans sprung from their pods as I was picking them, so to keep from having to ferret the beans out of the dirt, I got in the habit of placing a tray under the bush I was harvesting.

  When the beans seemed dry enough (a fully dried bean is one hard enough that you don’t leave a print when you press a fingernail into the skin), it was time to shell them.

  Methods varied. I read about one guy who separated his beans from their dried pods by putting them in a bag, which he whacked on the ground for a while. I’d worry a little about breaking the beans, but perhaps he was whacking gently.

  I went for a more subdued method, though likely not as much fun. I put the pods in a box and scrunched them with my hands until they crackled open. I scrunched and scrunched and threw away the large pieces of empty pods until I was left with a pile of beans and a huge amount of chaff.

  To get rid of the chaff, I took my beans outside in a dishcloth hammocked between my two hands and gently tossed the mixture up and down, letting the breeze blow the chaff away. This worked to some extent, but the breeze wasn’t quite strong enough to take care of all of it. Then I tried blowing into the chaff/bean mix as I tossed it. But very quickly I wavered dizzily on the verge of hyperventilation. My tossing became so erratic that I repeatedly had to stop and pick up beans I’d accidentally flung onto the ground. No wonder.

  With the next batch of beans, I figured out a way to blow the chaff away without the risk of blacking out mid-procedure. I turned on a fan and placed a container on the ground beside it. As I poured the mixture into the container, the fan blew the chaff away from the stream of beans, which fell cleanly into the container. I finished the job on my feet.

  I stored my beans in a glass jar. To prevent molding, I tossed in one of those packets that come in vitamin jars.

  When it came time to cook the beans, I made a pot of my famous green-chile chili using my homegrown cranberry beans. The beans were delicious—tender, with a smooth texture, having what would be called “tooth” if they were pasta. Sam asked what kind of beans were in it. They were really good. Louis concurred.

  Were homegrown beans that much better, or was it merely a “grew it myself” pride that colored our perception of the legumes? I decided to test our perceptions. I made the chili again the next week with store-bought beans. It was usual good, but not good good. Why would this be?

  If beans are less than six months old, they may not even require soaking before cooking. They plump up quickly. Commercially produced beans are usually much older than six months by the time you purchase them in the store, often as far as three years from their harvest. (One of the possible drawbacks to using them as seed.) The longer a bean has been stored, the more likely it is to absorb odors, and to change colors and taste.

  Commercial beans are also processed by machinery. This can be hard on a poor little bean. If the beans are even a little too dry, they are subject to cracking, splitting, and checkering, especially under the duress of a machine’s hard surfaces. If a bean’s skin is damaged, it cooks differently and is more likely to become mealy in the pot.

  If the beans aren’t quite dry enough at harvest, they are prone to molding. Even in a metal storage facility, beans that touch the walls will sweat if aeration is not just right.

  I am always ready to make a change if it will make something taste better. But this isn’t the only reason to grow your own beans. Consider this: commercial beans are planted, cut, and threshed by tractors, then trucked to a processor where they are machine washed, machine milled, polished, and poured by machines into bulk bags. The bags are trucked to processing plants, packaged into smaller bags (machine-made plastic) for the consumer, and then those bags are trucked out to the grocery outlets, to which the consumer drives in order to purchase a measure of legumes for stew. That’s a lot of petroleum product going into those beans.

  Further, commercial beans are usually subjected to two to three fungicidal treatments before harvest. When the farmer sees that most of the beans in the field are close to harvest, an herbicide such as Roundup is applied to the leaves to kill the plants so that the beans will be drier when they are harvested a number of days thereafter. As a result, however, the beans may carry traces of the herbicide in their fruit.

  If that isn’t enough to make you go running for the trowel, here’s more good news. Beans are recommended for first-time gardeners because they are super easy to grow. So easy, in fact, that it seems everyone grew a bean plant as a science experiment in grade school. Including me. When I was ten years old, I got a third-place ribbon in a science fair for testing the effect of feeding milk to bean plants instead of just water. There may have only been three science fair entries in my age group, come to think of it, but the point is that my room smelled like soured cream for the entire month I grew beans. If beans will grow with rancid dairy products mucking up their environment, you know they will grow for you.

  While growing your beans will be easy, there are a number of difficult decisions to be made before digging in. The first decision will be whether you’d like to grow snap beans, shelling beans, or dried beans. That is, do you want to eat fresh beans in the pod, fresh beans out of the pod, or dried beans out of the pod?

  Further complicating matters is that beans come in “bush varieties” and “pole varieties.” Bush varieties, on the plus side, don’t need support and often produce their fruit earlier than pole beans. However, they often don’t produce as long, and the beans get dirtier being that close to the ground. Pole beans require staking but they produce their beans for a longer time, and the beans are often straighter and cleaner since they are developing in the penthouse suite rather than ground floor.

  The most important choice, however, is one that not everyone realizes is a choice at all. At least I wasn’t aware of it. While I understood beans came in different colors, it seemed to be an aesthetic difference, and choosing between them was akin to picking the green iPod over the hot-pink one. Beans taste like . . . beans, after all.

  Turns out, beans have flavors as varied as those of cheese. For instance, while pintos are said to have an earthy flavor and a mushier texture, cranberry beans are more delicate, tasting nutty. Anasazi beans are sweeter. French green lentils are peppery in taste, and garbanzos have a walnutty-chestnutty aspect. Favas are characterized as sweet-earthy, flageolet as creamy. Turtle beans have a strong, almost mushroom-like flavor and floury texture, and pigeon peas (ancient beans that have been found in Egyptian tombs) have the reputation of being slightly narcotic.

  How to choose? Perhaps the best way is by recipe—what do you like to eat? Greek giant oven-baked beans? Go for butter beans. Black beans are indispensable if you make your own veggie burgers. Tuscan bean soup calls for kidney beans, and cannelloni and crostini go together like, well, cannelloni and crostini. A fan of Japanese kuri yokan? Grow azuki beans. My favorite soup is chickpea with orzo and rosemary, and mung beans added to chopped beets and onion, vinegar and honey is pretty wonderful too. Red beans stand up well to meat—such as sausages or in chili with chicken. Fava beans tossed with olive oil and lemon juice are pretty much a perfect meal.

&nbs
p; In other words, set aside a good part of your garden for beans. You’ll want to try bean bourguignon, to cook up some cassoulet, and to not forget three-bean salad, green bean casserole, fabada asturiana (Spanish bean stew), Great Northern beans with ham, beans in garlic sauce, black beans and mango, and even black bean brownies.

  Recipe

  Green-Chile Chili

  There are more arguments about the length of time required to soak beans than there are about the merits of one political party versus the other, and neither are very likely to be resolved. The reasons, at least with the bean debate, are clear: soaking time depends on how dry the beans are, how old, what kind of beans you are using, how big those beans are, and even the preferred texture of bean dishes. I’ll tell you what I do with my dried-this-season beans, but I recommend you experiment on your own, read up on it, call your mother, or all of the above

  Another point of contention with beans is the issue of gas. When soaked, beans release complex carbohydrates (raffinose sugars) that are not broken down in digestion, hanging out instead in the large intestine, fermenting. Generally I’m all in favor of fermentation, but not so much the intestinal kind. (When Jesse was young he used to refuse to eat beans on a school night. If I forgot and served them, he’d glower and make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead.) People try all sorts of things to get around the problem, from throwing away several rounds of soaking water or taking anti-gas tablets available at drug stores, to timing their bean consumption around, say, school holidays.

  Once a person eats more fruits and vegetables, however, their systems adjust to being bean friendly. Now that we eat out of the garden most nights, we don’t experience the “problem beans are famous for.” A revelation appreciated by all, I’m sure.

  There is yet another bone of contention in the world of bean cookery—the salt and tomato (or acid) issue. You can find plenty of legume aficionados who will insist that salt and/or tomatoes will keep the beans from softening correctly. What I have deduced from reading scientific sources on “to salt and tomato your beans or not to salt and tomato” is that salt will merely make things saltier, and the acid in the tomatoes keeps the skins intact. I can imagine how the acid effect would seem (or even directly affect) a longer cooking time if you like your beans mushier (broken skins will make that happen), but I figure one should put the salt and tomatoes in whenever they wish, as far as cooking time is concerned.

  One trick that does make a difference for me is making sure that once the beans are up to boil, I turn the beans down low. If I ever mess up this dish it’s because I believe I can speed things up by increasing the heat, but then the liquid boils away, and if I don’t actually burn the beans (which is usually the case), I end up with beans mushier than I care for.

  Ingredients: • 2 carrots

  • 2 stalks of celery

  • 2 cups of green chile (roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped)

  • 2 cups of chopped tomatoes

  • 4 large potatoes cut into one-inch cubes (I wish it were just 2 potatoes to keep up with the 2 “theme,” but they would have to be humungous spuds)

  • 2 cups of dried beans

  • Salt to taste

  1. Rinse the beans, removing any chaff or detritus.

  2. Cover the cleaned beans in water and let them sit. I usually do this around lunch and then unfortunately forget about the whole thing until an hour or two before dinner—or, more likely, just about the time everyone’s asking if dinner’s almost ready.

  3. Pour the beans into a colander and let them drain. I usually take this opportunity to dice the carrots, onions, and celery into small pieces.

  4. Saute the vegetables in olive oil in a stew pot until the onions are translucent.

  5. Add the soaked beans and green chile (which is usually a frozen brick of green chile I grew and roasted in the summer), the tomatoes, and the salt to the pot and top it up with either water or stock until there is 2 to 3 inches of liquid over the top of the beans.

  6. Bring the whole thing to a boil then turn the temperature down so that the beans are barely at a simmer. Cook for approximately 3 hours or until the beans are tender. I try to keep an eye on it, adding water as needed.

  7. Throw in the potatoes during the last half hour.

  By the time my homegrown beans are tender, the potatoes are usually done as well and the stew has thickened nicely.

  If I’ve remembered to start the stew in good time, we usually eat it the same night. If I haven’t, then we have grilled cheese sandwiches (I call them “panini” to make it sound like I’m on top of things, after all). When the stew is finished, I refrigerate it to eat the next night.

  That’s for the best, really. If you want the very best green-chile chili ever, you will steel yourself to wait to eat it for dinner the next day. Green chile stew always tastes better the second day. Serve with hot sauce and hot tortillas.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WEEDS

  “What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wilderness?

  Let them be left, Oh let them be left, wilderness and wet;

  Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

  —GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS

  My sister, Summer, was not only more daring than I but more beautiful. I had a round face, distinctly un-soulful eyes, and no desire to call attention to those facts by doing what Summer did the year she turned sixteen—dye her hair.

  Summer came into my room post dye-job, her hair so audaciously dark and free of highlights it looked as if she had a shag-shaped black hole where her auburn hair had once been. She asked if I could tell that she had colored her hair. I choked out, “Yeah!” both writhing with the thrill of the coming hell-to-pay that for once had nothing to do with me, and also mourning for the sister who would soon be taken from me at my mother’s hand.

  In my family, teenager plus hair dye equaled prodigious amounts of weeding time. Thirty some years later, my sister is, I believe, still in hard labor in my parents’ backyard, wrenching dandelions and bindweed from the rocky soil.

  When my kids hit the age of hair dye, Jesse begged me to let him change the color of his mop. I said certainly not—even though by then a kid changing his hair to Barbie doll black, or purple and orange stripes, for that matter, was hardly unusual. When my friends asked me if I really thought it so wrong, I scoffed, “Of course not. But there’s work to be done!”

  My kids also grew up righting their wrongs in the garden, which worked out pretty well—for me at least. I wouldn’t go so far to say that I hoped they would misbehave, but it did make their transgressions so much easier to take when I knew their failure to turn in homework, their missed curfew, or the smell of tobacco on their clothes was going to translate into a weed-free garden to salve the trauma to their longsuffering mother.

  Unfortunately, Sam caught on to my plan and has not even approached a bottle of hair dye.

  When I started working the quarter acre, weeds seemed to be something I was truly gifted with growing. For every bean I managed to germinate, a hundred weeds sprouted from the soil. I was watering more Bermuda grass than beets and pulling more dandelions than carrots. By the time August came, a verdant porridge of weedage abounded, and I was beside myself. But I had a plan.

  On the morning of August 4, I put a sign in my front yard that said, “IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. HELP ME WEED!” I fantasized that my neighbors would walk by, chuckle, then say in a folksy tone reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart, “Well, now, I’ve got ten minutes, how ’bout I pull this patch of Bermuda grass for you?”

  Strangers would then stop, marvel at all the neighbors pitching in like a barn was being raised, and they too would put their hand to yanking bindweed. Before I knew it, the Quarter-Acre Farm would be . . . pristine. Not a weed in evidence. Tamed.

  Instead, the first thing that happened was that Sam read the sign and decided I was trying to humiliate him to death. And that was pretty much the only thing that happened. No one stopped by to help. Our street
was as deserted as Tombstone on the day the Clantons came to town. I imagined my neighbors peering from behind their curtains, reading the sign, and shouting to their families, “Get back, she’ll see you!”

  Finally, in the late afternoon, the sweet boy next door showed up with a bouquet of flowers he had picked to wish me happy birthday. I exclaimed over the flowers then asked Daniel if he had seen the sign in the front yard. He squirmed. “Yee-es.” I asked him if he’d like to be the first one to help, and before he could bolt I pointed to a strand of bindweed at his feet.

  Really, it was a symbolic gesture. I didn’t make him weed, not really. But still, Louis and Sam couldn’t believe I had coerced the nice kid next door into doing my dirty work. I couldn’t believe they couldn’t believe it. That’s the kind of thing you have to do when weeds are the problem.

  Weeds thrive in disturbed soil. So while I was digging out grass and making hills and setting up new beds, I was turning a huge number of seeds into the dirt that I had so very carefully added amendments to so that the beds would be fertile. Then I very nicely watered it. I made the conditions perfect for plants, and as E.J. Salisbury pointed out in 1935, a weed is merely a plant out of place.

  The worst “plant out of place” that I struggled with was bindweed. Bindweed is also commonly known as wild morning glory, or creeping Jenny, and was the first weed to be recognized as a national menace by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I had been careful never to let the bindweed go to seed—so where was all the bindweed coming from? Turns out, bindweed seeds can survive for more than twenty-five years before germinating. Some of the seeds that were coming up in my beds may have come to fruition back when my sixteen-year-old sister was deciding between coloring her hair Parisian Onyx or Ebony Night.