A Good Place for Green Beans

It’s spring and I’m wanting to plant things, loving seeing the green trees and getting ambitious.  This often happens to me in the spring and I sometimes bite off more than I can chew.

We’ve been working hard to clean up a field we let get to close to overgrown and now with some dead trees down and scrub brush cut back, I suggested to my husband, “We could do something with this.  Why, we could grow a crop of green beans here!”

Of course for a girl raised in the bean field, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, isn’t it?  Well, it reminded me of a 4 part blog series I wrote way back in 2013 and I wanted to share that with you this week.  Below is the first part and at the end are links to the next 3 sections. 

I’d love to hear YOUR Green Bean stories!

The Green Bean Phenomenon

November 14, 2013 Beth Durham

                The shadows lengthened as the summer sun lazily began his trek over the horizon.  Coal oil lights burned in the homes as supper was finished, prayers were said and children tucked into their beds.  Sleep was welcomed, for the people of the plateau had worked hard this day.

                Today was not unusual; it was summertime and the green bean harvest was upon us.  Early in the morning, men, women and children alike streamed into the bean fields to pull from the vines little emerald sticks of wealth… or at least livelihood.

                The green bean phenomenon began its sweep across the plateau in 1933 and lasted until the 1980’s.  In the wake of this sensation we find a community transformed, and lots and lots of stories! 

                As the story goes, in 1933 work was scarce and money short.  Well that’s just history – U.S. history.  We all know that with the stock market crash of ’29 the nation was plunged into The Great Depression.  I’ve heard stories of farm families who had no stake in the stock market, little money in the 20’s and therefore felt the depression years only mildly.  Perhaps that would be the case on the plateau as well – for there was no industry here before the depression years, no great companies closed their doors in that time, no breadwinners dismissed from good jobs. 

                Needing work and unafraid of hard work, Dempse Cooper spotted a truck loaded with green beans headed south through Fentress County and wanted to know what that was all about.  He fell in behind him and followed him till he could stop and question the driver.

                It seems the load had originated in Kentucky where farmers were growing green beans for public sale. Mr. Cooper saw an opportunity. He planted a single acre of beans.  By 1954, 6,000 acres of plateau farmland was planted in green beans and income from the crop had topped 1 million dollars.

                Green beans are somehow legendary in our community.  So, the telling will take several chapters – or weeks in the blog world.  Next week, we’ll visit The Bean Shed!  Now you know you won’t want to miss that do you?

Part 2: The Bean Shed

Part 3: First Diesel Truck ‘Round Here

Part 4: The Mechanical Pickers

Garden Mystery

Well we’ve come to the time of year when fresh garden vegetable abound.  Now, I’m not a very good gardener.  I was working in the garden a couple of weeks ago and thought to myself that I’m glad my Grandpa couldn’t see the poor potato patch I’ve raised – he’d just shake his head; he wouldn’t say a word but I know that he would be thinking that I might starve to death this winter.

But that fear that my family will hunger drives me to keep putting out a garden despite my poor skills.  And this year I did it again.  My favorite garden vegetable is Squash – as I’ve mentioned here before.  And I try to plant it several times so it keeps producing until the harshest of frosts.  This year I opened a packet labelled with a beautiful yellow squash on the front and planted a few hills.  After a few days of heavy rain they were well sprouted but had washed out of their place and were growing between the rows.  I moved a few but decided I could work around the rest.  I was mistaken.

As the plants grew I knew they weren’t squash because they put out these great long runners.  Could I have mistakenly planted cucumbers in those hills?  Not to worry, I love cukes too.  Then the leaves broadened and I knew they weren’t cucumbers.  Then the melons set on looking like those crook-necked squash I’d hoped for.  However, they were quickly striping-up.  Now I have huge plants – in fact they’ve taken over that part of the garden and I’m having to fight them back just to gravel out my pitiful potato patch.  We’ve been calling them the “Squash from Planet X” because they  look like something from a science fiction movie.

I’m hoping y’uns can help me out in identifying them.  I’ll try to use them but I don’t know how until I can identify them.

This mystery makes me think about the generations of gardeners and farmers who had no opportunity to go to the local Farmer’s Co-op and buy a package of seed.  Instead, they carefully saved seed from plants they marked early on and left to fully mature.  Seeds were placed on a newspaper and set in the sun to dry out then stored in an envelope – or just wrapped up in that paper and carefully labelled.  Sharing seeds with family and neighbors was the sweetest of gifts and a favorite variety of beans or tomatoes were guarded like the most valuable treasure. 

Do you think anyone ever failed to label an envelope?  Or got a seed-present from a friend but didn’t get a good description?  Did any of those master gardeners ever face this mystery, wondering what was going to grow and what they’d do with it in the end?

And would my gardening abilities improve any if I didn’t have a reliable food supply network and I knew I and my family would be hungry if I didn’t raise enough food and didn’t store it properly?  Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’d be better at it in that situation.  In fact, I recognize that time is my biggest enemy in the garden.  There are too many things making demands of my time and the garden often falls too low on the priority list.  If my existence, or even my wintertime comfort, depended on it that garden would surely be more important!