Every season for a decade, I've grown a crop of green beans, a trusty productive bush varietal that graces my summer and fall tables with plump and sweet goodness. And every season, I've saved seeds from the strongest of those bean plants, so that I've developed a long and fruitful relationship with their lineage.
Twenty twenty five was to be no different. I started the season planting a single four by eight bed of beans, which I set into the ground in early April. By late July, that first crop was spent, providing a dozen meals worth of veggies, and a fat gallon bag full of blanched and flash-frozen beans for later.
I prepped another four by eight bed for a late season harvest, and put in another three rows of beans. These, I'd both harvest and seed-save, following the pattern of the last decade. The good hearty beans came up dutifully, dozens of cheery little seedlings poking up diligently as they always had. I watered and weeded, and all was well, the plants bustling along nicely.
Then in late July, I left for a week at the beach.
When I returned in early August, they were all gone.
All of them. Given the hoof-prints in the completely devastated bed, the culprit was clear, one of the dastardly devouring does who wander through our green and leafy inner suburb. I'd sprayed the young plants with repellent before leaving, but it had rained and rained again in my absence, and the spray must have all washed away. The crop was wiped out.
I still had the bag of flash-frozen beans, which meant that my tradition of using my own beans for the obligatory Thanksgiving casserole could continue. But I had gathered no seed stock from the spring harvest. None of what I had expected to use to plant my crop in 2026 had survived. Not a bit of it.
This presented me with a bit of a conundrum as the weather warmed this season. I had no fresh green bean seed. I had some stock left from 2024. And I had even more stock left from 2023, because I'd had a roaring bumper crop that year, hundreds of beans in a big ol' jar.
But beans, wonderful as they are, don't last forever. Three to five years, typically, if kept sealed away, cool, and out of direct light. After that, the peculiar magics of seed genetics, the complex organic triggers that wake with water and warmth? Gone.
With the last frost reasonably behind us, and a mid-spring heatwave well underway, I decided to try the oldest seed first. I figured I'd have a nontrivial failure rate, so I tripled the density of the spacing. Not six inches apart in a row, but more like two, massively oversowing the rows in anticipation of a lower yield. I planted all of that three year old seed, every last bean.
Then I watered, and weeded, and waited. A week passed. Then another. The earth was warm, and other volunteers sprang up where I had planted, squash and cantaloupe, from the looks of them. But not a single one of my beans poked a familiar head out of the earth. Literally hundreds of them, and the success rate was zero point zero zero percent.
That's the nature of the stale and the sterile, and those things that have forgotten what they are.
You can still put them in the ground, but they dissolve into nothingness, not growing into the purpose that made them, but instead becoming one with the soil.
They have lost their sense of self, the intrinsic and essential potential which made them alive in the first place. The gift of life has left them.
Good thing I have that stock from two years ago, I thought. We'll see how that goes.
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