It was early April when I started limas, which is too late but I thought, why not?
And since then an every day miracle is unfolding on my kitchen window sill. In just a few days, three lima bean seeds burst upward, out of the warmth and moisture provided by the useful repurposed plate warmer below and plastic wrap above, throwing potting soil aside to head for the sky.
The seeds were a couple years old, the Christmas gift from a cousin, and the great-great-great- grandchildren of lima bean plants that my father In-Law grew. Every year he harvested lima beans, Doc Martins, and put them in the freezer. Every Thanksgiving we ate them. The year he died, my husband and his brothers found a harvest in the freezer when cleaning out his house, and had a feast.
But old seeds was not an issue. After a boring week where I gave them up for dead, and figured it was too late, and nothing was ever going to change, the soil split open A thick stem emerged, bent over, as if gathering pressure to flng itself into the sky. With a giant seed like a lima, you can see every change, and once begun, they expand hourly. Wow!
I have done this before, so I know it ain’t that easy. Keeping seedlings going without them drying out, or getting too wet and succumbing to mildew, or stalling and not growing, or growing too fast and going all leggy before the transition to the gardens, can be tricky. It’s work.
So, is it really worth it? You can just buy Lima beans.
But Jack knew about magic beans, and I do too.
I feel a call deep in my being to grow food, and I don’t know why. I have plenty to do. It is unnecessary. Did I get farmer genes from some ancestor? Perhaps I was always going to be like this, coming down the birth canal myself dreaming of chickens and eggs, and growing my own food. Or maybe I learned it from my professor father who used to start trays of seeds in the tiny utility room of our home. I remember his tiny quirky script on the labels, “cosmos,” “zinnias,” “ageratum.” These he transplanted into a garden of heavy clay he called the fertile crescent. Eventually he gave up, and grew roses exclusively. But he never taught me to bring food out of the ground.
Whether it was nature or nurture, when I married I discovered the magazine Organic Gardening and that childhood fascination swelled and grew within me, putting down roots in my life. Inspired by my husband and his dad, our gardens expanded, our compost piles multiplied. I kept bees, and then laying hens, and then meat chickens! I put up applesauce and canned salsa. My mother would have been horrified. I don’t seem to get tired of learning how to grow things.
Often I have been too ambitious, my ideas grown wild and leggy, over-spilling their pots, and climbing the walls of my mind. If not pruned, they can strangle me. But I have learned something in 61 years. I know that a little gardening is so good for me, and that a little is enough. If the electrical grid were to shut down, as it did Spain and France did this week, and the supply lines broke, and we had suddenly to grow our own nourishment, I am ready.
But until then, and for the rest of my life, I will continue to put at least a few seeds into the soil each spring, and marvel at the magic.
Suburban Growing 