I would like to know what motherfucker thought it would be an excellent idea to plant bush beans this summer. What a fucking PAIN IN THE ASS it is to go down a row of those fucking things and find all the beans that are big enough to pick.
That motherfucker was me, by the way. I was all “Nah, let’s do bush beans this year instead of pole beans!” and Fred was all “But what a pain in the ass!” and then I was all “Well, I’ll take care of picking them. You always pick them when they’re too big and they get all stringy and shit.”
Spring Robyn is always FAR too happy to sign up Summer Robyn for shit like that, and as Summer Robyn, let me just say: Shut the fuck up, Spring Robyn, you fucking asshole.
Next year we’re doing pole beans (and no doubt Spring 2012 Robyn will be ALL too happy to sign Summer 2012 Robyn up to pick those fucking beans, too). Why do we grow so many goddamn green beans, anyway? Who loves beans THAT much? We always end up with ten tons of them in the freezer and have to eat them at every meal and by December we’re all “O goody. Beans again!”
Note, because I know someone out there is wondering and doesn’t know the difference (I sure didn’t before we had our own garden): bush beans grow in bushes so that the beans hide under the leaves of the plant. Pole beans grow up a pole or – in our case – a fence panel. The pole beans can still hide under the leaves of the plant, but you don’t have to spend as much time bent over, digging through the fucking plant to see them. Also, bush beans produce beans all at once and then stop, whereas pole beans keep producing them – thus, with bush beans the work of blanching and freezing (I don’t much care for canned green beans, for the record) happens all at once, but with pole beans the work is more spread out.
I’m sure next summer I’ll be bitching about the pole beans and swearing to do bush beans in 2013.
One thing I bought this year that has come in really handy is a garden cart, like this one (I bought it at Lowe’s, though). I was able to sit on that thing and scoot down the row of green beans rather than having to stand bent over. It was a lot easier on my back. It also came in handy when I was going down the row of tomatoes pruning and checking for early blight (which I haven’t seen since I sprayed for it twice).
Speaking of tomatoes, we’ve eaten exactly three cherry tomatoes. We have a bazillion green tomatoes that are inching ever closer toward ripening, and hopefully that’ll happen this century.
We’ve been eating the hell out of squash and zucchini – for dinner last week, we had scrambled eggs every night, with sides of veggies. Thursday night, I made pattypan squash stuffed with sauteed zucchini and yellow squash, roasted yellow squash, and sliced raw zucchini with ranch dressing for dipping. Oh! And leftover zucchini fritters. When dinner was over, Fred said “This is the most squash-centric meal I’ve ever eaten.”
The squash side dishes have just begun! ::evil laugh::
Last week I got an email from Burpee exhorting me to start thinking about my Fall garden (seriously, wtf? It’s not even July, motherfuckers!), and one of the links in the email was to their selection of garlic. So I clicked on that to go over and see what was what with the garlic they had (I’ve never grown garlic before, but I’m thinking of planting it this Fall so it’ll be ready to harvest next summer. I love me some garlic.). A few days later, I got an email from them proclaiming that I could get FREE shipping on garlic.
Fucking stalkers. They could be a LITTLE more subtle about the fact that they were following me around the internet looking over my shoulder as I perused their site, no?
(I haven’t decided about the garlic yet. If I do plant some this Fall, I’ll probably get it from the local co-op.)
Speaking of, um, stinky veggies, I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but this Spring I planted about 150 onions. Currently, I’ve got about 20 growing. I find that SO FUCKING ANNOYING. I love onions! (Between my onion and garlic love, don’t you wish you were kissing acquaintances with me?) Fred mentioned the possibility of doing a long raised bed next year for the onions, so that’s something to look forward to.
All the kittens are doing well. It’s like a crazy house in here these days, with kittens hopping everywhere like fleas. It’s surprisingly quiet in the middle of the day, with them flopped everywhere sleeping – but wild little monkeys first thing in the morning and at dusk.
I weighed the Spice Girls over the weekend. Cilantro and Cori are both a couple of ounces over 2 pounds, and little Clove is at 1 pound, 10 ounces, so it’ll be a bit longer before they all go to be spayed. Fred reported that he saw Clove rooting around in Miz Poo’s belly fur, clearly looking for a nipple, and Miz Poo was not appreciative of this development, so hissed and smacked at her.
Poor Clove (but I can’t say that I blame Miz Poo!)
Macushla’s in charge of guarding the food.
Ciara, trying to latch on. Poor Maggie – she tries her best to ignore them when they do this. Eventually, she either gives in, or jumps up where they can’t get to her.
Sleeping McMaos.
There’s a bed RIGHT THERE, but noooo, he has to curl up in a miserable ball on top of my sewing basket. Weirdo.
They’re so ridiculously long and lanky at this age.
Okay, well, THAT looks comfy.
So proud of herself for flinging that pink hat off her head.
Cilantro, eye on the feather teaser.
Planning her jump.
Whoaaaa…. back she goes!
Still swingin’!
Clove in profile.
Cilantro in profile.
Her little smile just slays me.
Maxi keeps me company when I do outside chores.
Previously
2010: No entry.
2009: No entry.
2008: You spoil them rotten until they get big-ass, then you slaughter and eat them, of course!
2007: Is it just me, or do these look like weirdly posed scenes, like something you’d see in the JC Penney catalog? I imagine a photographer yelling “Frick! You WANT him, you want him with every feather on your body, but Sugarbutt! You don’t even notice Frick, you’re just standing there being beautiful. Be beautiful, Sugarbutt! Be beautiful and feisty and unattainable, and Frick! Want him! Want him badly, but sadly, knowing that you can never have someone that beautiful. He’s out of your league! PERFECT!”
2006: The meals sucked, but we got t-shirts that were pretty cute, so I guess it all worked out.
2005: Can I sue for emotional distress?
2004: No entry.
2003: I never said I had a long attention span.
2002: You can imagine the zany situations.
2001: No entry.
2000: Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.
I hate hate HATE green beans with the white hot passion of a thousand burning suns. Why? Because they are, indeed, every bit the prolific S.O.B.s you have described, and put in appearances on my childhood dinner plate MUCH too often. My parents had a wonderful garden when I was growing up, with one major exception. The Damn. Green. Beans. Which grew without ceasing. The saddest day of my young years was the day the deep freeze was delivered, and the ‘rents discovered the joys of freezing green beans. March would roll around and I would think “FINALLY! The green beans HAVE to be gone!” But nooooooo. Mom would up-end herself in the deep freeze and come out with yet ANOTHER gallon bag of the little green bits of hell. I won’t go anywhere near them now. Bastards.
So what I’m hearing, Jennifer, is that I should send my extra green beans to you? 😀
I couldn’t agree more, Jennifer. The only thing more prolific than the goddamn green beans was the squash, but at least I *like* squash.
And here’s something for you to think about when you’re groping through those damn bean bushes: snakes just luuuurrrve to hide out under them. Trust me, I speak from personal experience.
Snakes don’t skeer me! (Even though they probably ought to. Especially around here!)
You’re hilarious. Really. 😉
The fate of Summer Robyn reminds me very much of this post about Future Kate:
http://sarahb.tumblr.com/post/463245402
Ha – I love it!
Cilantro (in profile) is such a gorgeous picture!!! You take the most AWESOME photos…I know, you are like me…100 snaps to get 15 great photos…but you catch them at their best and I love your photos : )
Awww, thank you! I plugged in my camera yesterday to see what I had on there, and there were 180 pictures to look through. I ended up keeping 40 of them! I figure, hey – at least there were 40 worth keeping, which isn’t so bad. 🙂
I love green beans – raw; send them to Houston.
I’ve got a very leafy cucumber and a very leafy zucchini but no actual produce. Ditto on the tomato plants. I think it got too hot, too quick here. I don’t want to uproot them but I get pissed every time I walk out the back door and look at them. If plants had middle fingers, they’d be waving them in my direction.
I bought one of these at Lowe’s a few years ago and love it. It rocks allowing you to lean without tipping over (most of the time!) and it’s lightweight and easy to carry:
http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Brand-Rocker-Green/dp/B0002P12FA/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1309185075&sr=1-1
I have that seat, too! I just like the cart because I can scoot down the row without having to get up. The seat comes in handy if I’m going to be doing something that takes more than a minute or two.
The idea of your plants giving you the middle finger(s) made me LOL – and I know what you mean!
Have you ever cooked your squash *in* your eggs? I slice it and cook in butter or olive oil, then pour beaten egg over it, cover, and when it’s almost done I slide it out of the pan onto the cover and flip it back into the pan to finish.
Nowadays, this is called a frittata, but my grandmother, who was from Sicily, called it eggs and [whatever vegetable]. Really good with broccoli or asparagus, too.
You know, I actually haven’t – that sounds really good, though, I think I’ll have to give it a try!
Alton Brown has a really good recipe for a squash frittata on the Food Network site.
And the word “frittata” never fails to make me sing “hakuna frittata!” I amuse myself far too much.
Ha!
I love green beans but I think we all have those hated foods shoved down our throats far too often in childhood. Mine is meatloaf which I’ve cooked maybe three times in 31 years. The Zucchini thing made me think of a story my bff told me . She took another friend’s mom(a lady in her eighties) out to lunch. The only vegetable offered was zuchinni and the older lady hates it. She kind of made a scene in the resturant going on and on about how it’s the cheapest vegtable so resturants offer it way too often. I really like zucchini too but would have loved to hear and see the octagarian rant.
I’m sure it is the cheapest vegetable – those plants produce like crazy! I do like zucchini, though, because they’re so versatile. I’ve got a jar of zucchini dill pickles in my fridge right now. 🙂 (And next weekend: zucchini bread!)
I love green beans too, so whatever you don’t send to Lori in Houston, send to me in Austin!. I can’t grow any vegetables: 1) it is too hot and no rain for months now and 2) my damn dogs get whatever vegetable (flower, shrub, etc) is growing out of the ground and pull it completely out – and then devour it. Amazingly enough the little bastards leave all the weeds alone. I am hopeful they might grow out of this stage by next summer when they are no longer puppies – and the future Suzy will try again with some plants.
Love the Spice girls, all such beautiful kittens.
I don’t like green beans, they were one of the few things my dad could grow in the cold rainy Northwest, and we ate them every meal for months. Ugh.
I have a cat question for you. I’d never had a cat until I started reading your blog. Now I have two. 🙂 We have a five year old female who’s lived here for three years, and then in the winter we got a one year old male. We have no idea how to introduce them, and don’t know what kind of behavior is normal. We feed them together, and they’re fine until the food is gone. When they see each other, there’s a lot of hissing and smacking. Is that normal? My husband is all freaked out that they’re going to hurt each other, so after six months we still have to keep one of them in a closed room while the other is out. And whichever one it is is usually yelling about it. Husband is gone this week, and I just want to let them both out and get used to each other. Can I do that? Isn’t that how it works? They’re both nice, pretty mellow cats when they’re on their own.
Thank you for any advice any of you may have. And thank you for persuading me that I could be a cat person.
Yay, another one converted to my crazy cat ways! 😉
This is what I would do if I were you: let them out for a few hours while you’re home to supervise, and see how it goes. The smacking and hissing is completely normal – I wouldn’t get worried unless they were actually screaming and biting each other, and even then I don’t think I’d worry unless they were doing it constantly. If that goes okay, I’d lengthen the time they’re around each other – but I think I’d still give them the occasional break (maybe half an hour or so) from each other every few hours until they’ve spent enough time around each other to chill out. The hissing and smacking is normal for cats, because to be honest, they’re just little drama queens and they have to work out who’s in charge.
Let me know if you have any other questions – and let me know how it goes!
I’m telling right now: Don’t even think about buying 150 garlic bulbs thinking ‘Hey Fall Robyn would just loooove to plant those!’ Step away from the Burpee’s site, Summer Robyn. Step. Away.
Hush up, you lazy beotch, and get to planting! (Don’t forget to water all those cabbages I made Fall Robyn plant too! Mwahaha!)
Okay. Last year I planted lovely pole beans around the 4 trellis corners of a client’s gazebo. And I walked around and around with my arms over my head picking those green beans until I was dizzy and weary woe and we don’t even LIKE them that much. Forget about pole beans. This year, I planted 3 wee little bush beans because they came in a three pack. That should be manageable right? Just 3 little bean plants? Well Robyn I think these things will NEVER stop producing. They DONT get all ripe at once, they ripen some each day so I am constantly down there a pickin’ and a hoein’ with bent back and I keep leaving bowls of green beans on the counter for the other caregivers with nasty notes saying, “someone has to help me COOK these things or take some HOME or something. I am trembling in fear as I see the pickle plant has about 48,000 blossoms on it…