Growing at the Wrong Time

Over the last couple of weeks, I've gone about the annual business of bedding down my garden for winter.  The withered sunflower plot was first.  I seedsaved from some of the more productive flower heads, and then razed the stalks to the ground.  The larger and sturdier of them will serve as garden stakes next year, and the remainder...once dried...make for great kindling.

The tomatoes and cantaloupe vines were pulled, stacked, and shredded for compost.  The butternut squash, harvested and cured, and the vines similarly shredded.   The okra stand remains, for now, as I let the huge pods dry on the stalk for seed production.  The asparagus fronds will come down after the first hard frost, when they die off naturally, after which I'll bed them in with leaf mulch.   

My green beans, though. The beans had struggled a bit this year, mostly because I timed the harvest poorly and let too many go to seed, and then didn't manage to water 'em enough, so what did grow was far too seedy.  Production was modest at best.  But the two four by eight plots were nice and nitrogen fixed, and I had a new toy to play with.  An abandonware electric rototiller had made its way into my hands, and I figured I'd till in both the roots and the stems, charging the soil for my winter planting of garlic.  I know "no-till" has been a thing recently, and I appreciate the desire to maintain soil health and richness of biota.  But "no-till," to my ears, just means "leave it fallow."   You want to grow edible things on the same patch of soil for season after season?  You need to amend it and aerate it.

So I bumbled about with the whirring rototiller, which was kinda fun, churning and turning and shredding apart the bush bean stalks and roots.  Stepping back to look at the first bed I'd tilled, I realized:  Oops.  I'd not pulled all of the dried beans from the plants.  They'd been turned in along with the leaves and stalks.  All throughout the soil, hundred and hundreds of beans had just been planted, speckling the soil with their abundance.  I picked out what I could, and didn't replicate that error in the second patch, but knew I'd just made more work for myself.

In the week that followed, wet and unusually warm for October, I reaped the peculiar harvest of my mistake.  Green beans sprouted by the hundreds, densely packed, with all the vigor of a regularly watered Bob Ross Chia Pet.  Pretty little accidents indeed.  

Were this at a different season, I might have left them to grow.  But the first freezes are only weeks away, and not a one of those seedlings could make it through winter.  I needed the space for my garlic, and so out of the ground they all came, as I muttered apologies and noted that I'd be replanting beans in the spring.

As I went through, day after day, plucking the doomed new growth, it made me think about the timing of things in life.  Are we aware of the time and the season of our actions, and the impacts that the right action performed at the wrong moment might have?  Do we focus on what seems like a fruitful path, oblivious to the context that will render such an action useless or counterproductive?

There's a time and a season for beans, and there's a time and a season for garlic, and if we don't know the difference, our gardens won't prosper and give delight.