The garden is the boss of me

I know you super master menu planners are out there, all with your weekly menus and corresponding shopping lists and meals that are not 100% green beans, and that is all fine and good but what do you do with all the green beans?

What I'm saying is, we have a lot of green beans right now.

And the tepee looks on while hatching its next batch of beans.

And before that, we had a lot of lettuce.

And coming soon - we'll have a lot of tomatoes. And then melons.

We only get things in lots around here. Because of the garden. (And if you want to see what all's coming in from the garden - the tracker is updated.)

So, that means that we have dinner based on what there is a lot of. So, you might say that the garden is my menu planner and corresponding shopping lists wrapped up in one handy friendly package.

I say, the garden is the boss of me and - make no mistake about it - if I cross it, there will be hell to pay. In the form of giant tough green beans that can't be pawned off on anyone regardless of their lack of taste in produce.

You can't just slap a "Hey, this is local and organic" on a giant overgrown green bean and have people accept it. Not around here anyway - we're all such snobby produce wanters.

Anyway, so we have green beans, as you've likely heard.

When I'm first harvesting a crop, I get very crushy about it. I take its picture a thousand times and then, when I'm sick of them, the photos make me ill. So, in a few weeks, this photo will have me barfing.

And, since the garden is so totally the boss of me, I went out to the garden to figure out what we were having for dinner last night and confirmed that, yes, green beans were definitely on the menu.

Hooray. I mean, HOORAY! I'm still at that point in the season where I want to eat the beans. Because we've only had them for a few weeks now and the farmshare hasn't started loading up on them, but that's about to change this week so my HOORAY! will so be WHAT THE FUCK ENOUGH ALREADY, but you'll know when we get there.

If only just based on the amount of swears you see here. If I had one of those word cloud things, it'd probably change over the next few weeks to the point where the only big bold words would be GREEN BEANS and FUCKING A but I don't, so you're spared.

HOORAY!

Yes, let's get back to hooray because TINY TIMES - I picked our #1 Tomato last night!

It's only BIG TIMES when it's a standard tomato. But I'll take it. For now.

It's more like HOORAY! since it's only a cherry tomato, but still, I got excited. Particularly after I hunted and poked and bent in ways that are unseen outside of Bikram in order to find this tomato that I *knew* existed somewhere in the depths of the Sun Gold tomato plant that is totally overrun by the nasturtium right now.

Someone save us. Please.

They are one, the Sun Golds and the nasturtium, and that makes it hard to find the Sun Golds in the mass of plants.

Did you know that Sun Golds AND nasturtium are a golden yellow color? Because they are. And I knew that, too, but when the little nasturtium started voluntarily sprouting all over the god damned place I didn't pull them out because awwwwwwww they're volunteers and now I have a confusing mess on my hands.

OK, so these are peppers and nasturtium, but you get the color thing. Good job.

Specifically, I have yellow nasturtium growing in, up and amongst the Sun Gold tomatoes and red nasturtium growing in, up and amongst the Better Boy tomatoes and...well...I'm in for a lot of disappointment this summer because I've already gone in after THE FIRST TOMATO OH MY GOD so many times only to pull back a handful of red nasturtium flowers.

Which admittedly are pretty, but NOT AT ALL delicious like a red ripe tomato, and so I foresee a season of OH, it's only a nasturtium.

Annoying.

Meanwhile, I've gotten off track.

What I wanted to tell you guys was that the garden, in its infinite wisdom and overflowing bounty, told me that we'd be having beans, 1 tomato and basil for dinner last night and I'd better just dust off my brains and figure out how to make that into an edible meal.

Good job, dusty brains.

We had a lovely and very local pasta primavera-ish dish where the most exotic and far-reaching item was the whole wheat pasta from Trader Joe's and the localest (oh yes, localest) item was the basil, since it sits a bit closer to my kitchen than the beans do.

The squash came from the farmshare and OH how I was happy to dispatch that crop before it went moldy and nast in my crisper. Yeach.

If you're wondering where the tomato sauce came from, well, I think you know that I had a few tomatoes last year and that I canned a few of them and froze a few of them and I've been making sauce from them in anticipation of the newly someday arriving 2011 tomato crops and this time they ended up as the tomato in the pasta primavera-ish dish.

So - again - localest!

And that is how the garden became the boss of me. Also, it pointed its finger at me and shouted, "BOW DOWN MINION" and I did so obediently, but I assumed you have experienced similar things so have until now left it unsaid.

Stop staring at me, tomato. [RecipeS]

You're aware that the garden's been busy. I know you are because I keep telling you.

But, what I haven't told you lately is what the F we're doing with all that garden business. Rude of me, I know.

I also haven't been telling you exactly what the F I'm doing with everything in the farmshare for the purposes of weekly Farmshare Project updates, and for that I apologize. In the sense that I'm sorry I decided to do a tedious weekly post that would actually be more useful for people being buried alive by chard if it were a directory of recipes listed out by scary, unknown or potentially hazardous amounts of vegetables.

So, I am just going to be telling you, at random intervals, what all I'm cooking with these vegetables (because LORD KNOWS WE EAT A LOT OF VEGETABLES) and then linking to those recipes from The Farmshare Project tab that lives on the top of the blog there.

Yes, there. Go look. There's a lot of recipes already. You know this, too, because I have already told you, but I won't hold it against you if you forgot. YOU DIDN'T FORGET DID YOU? Sorry. I promise I forgive you.

No hard feelings.

Meanwhile, in all of my rudeness I haven't told you my new favorite tomato sandwich, and that is just not right.

What am I if not a dedicated tomato sandwich maker? Nothing, that's what. I friggen' shell of a gardener, perhaps.

Anyway, I was working from home the other day with my tomato (it proof reads and provides much needed tea refills) and by the time lunch rolled around, I'd hatched a plan for its demise. This plan also included getting rid of some leftover ciabatta type bread before it went bad and some cheese.

Except we didn't have the typical eat-it-with-ripe-tomatoes-cheese: fresh mozzarella.

Sadness briefly washed over me until I realized that HOT DAMN we have blue cheese. And not just any blue cheese, but some fancy ass buttermilk blue cheese that needed to go before we could break into the Amish blue cheese I'd gotten to make Bubba's favorite chicken salad.

It's a specific schedule for the blue cheese and we must follow it closely.

Anyway, and let's not pay any attention to the fact that I have a variety of blue cheeses in my dairy drawer, when I finally approached the tomato and plucked it from the plant (you really have to love the satisfying *snap* these Better Boys make when they are picked) and marched it off to the kitchen for slicing, its fate had been sealed.

Finny's BCT (Blue Cheese Tomato - der.)

Recipe by moi

 

Ingredients

1 sun-warmed homegrown tomato, sliced

2 slices of ciabatta bread, lightly toasted

2 T crumbled (buttermilk) blue cheese

(Olive oil) mayo

Fresh cracked pepper

To make

Scrape just a bit of mayo on both sides of the sandwich, add black pepper to the top half, crumbled blue cheese to the bottom and stack the tomatoes on top of the blue cheese. Press the top half on there and cut it in half if you so desire.

And, right there, I just told you how to make a sandwich as though you've never made one before. Retarded!

Oh well. You forgive me now and we'll all go on with our lives.

Also, with these slowly ripening tomatoes, I made my go-to hot weather tomato dish: Mellow Tomato Pasta and paired it with my go-to WHAT THE F AM I GOING TO DO WITH ALL THESE BEANS beans: Roasted Green Beans.

Notice those purple beans turned green when cooked. Purple FAIL.

Those recipes can also be found on the Farmshare Project Tab because I love you a lot. See? It's true.

Don't believe me? I've found a way for you to kill green beans, carrots, peas, onions and fennel in one meal.

Really. 

And if you happen to have most of a can of coconut milk threatening to go bad in your fridge, well, then you'll be extra happy, too.

I can't, however, take credit for the recipe because it's another Sunset one, but I totally recommend Pea and Carrot Coconut Curry if you're a curry person. Or a carrot person. Or a person woefully at a loss for what to do with all the vegetables included in the title. You get it.

The beans though? Let me tell you.

Roasted Beans with Fennel and Onion

Recipe from Live Earth Farm's newsletter

Ingredients

1 lb green beans, trimmed

1-2 fennel bulbs, sliced thinly (if you have a death wish, use the mandolin)

1 onion, sliced thinly (see dare above)

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

To make

After taking your own life in your hands by choosing to use the greatly-feared mandolin, add enough oil to cover your thick-bottomed pan and, when its warmed and fragrant, add your sliced fennel and onion, stirring occasionally until it's browned. I hear this process is called, "brown frying", but I find most technical cooking terms to be subject to user invention, so who knows if that's a real thing.

Anyway, while your fennel and onion is frying and browning, steam your beans until just crisp. Rinse them with cool water so they don't get all brown and grody. 

Could we call that, "brown-grodying"? Probably.

Once all your fennel and onion shavings are brown and such, toss in your crispy steamed beans and give them a good toss with some salt and pepper - as much as YOU, specifically, like. Me? I'm a salt girl. Which may explain why I drink so much water and feel like my tongue is shriveling half the day, but hey, that's my issue.

When everything has mingled to your satisfaction, serve it alongside your Pea and Carrot Coconut Curry and bask in the glow of having killed many vegetables with one totally edible meal.

You rule.

The Summer Menu (AKA What happens to the fennel every week)

Every week in early summer we get fennel in the farmshare.

HOO-ray.

When we first started getting the farmshare, I would take one look at the fennel and be like, "Oh fennel. You've come to the wrong place." And then I would bury it under something else I wasn't likely to deal with (beets come to mind) in the crisper and forget about it until it was too bouncy to contemplate any longer as food and then I'd throw it in the composter.

Bye-bye bouncy fennel.

Then I got tired of throwing away the fuzzy bouncy fennel bulb and decided to crack open a cookbook. Which is a totally original idea, I know.

And that's pretty much the start of the Summer Menu and how things like the Fall, Winter and Spring Menus came about.

I learned how to make Fennel Orange Olive Salad, which we loved a lot and was super easy, and we've been eating Fennel Orange Olive Salad every week during early summer for the past few years and not bouncing any fennel into the composter. HOO-ray.

So The Summer Menu, as we call it, is just a fancy ass way of saying that we have a bunch of recipes for the one good way I've learned to dispatch all of one vegetable in a single meal without either of us vomiting.

This system is pretty good, too.  So good, in fact, that Bubba commented the other night on how good we were getting at working through the garden and farmshare and chicken share and egg share and meat share and it's probably because of these menus that I've cobbled together over the years out of desperation for not wanting food going bouncy in my fridge.

That's a nice thing for him to say, I think, that I'm a good and resourceful cook (I hear what I want to hear) even though it sort of hearkens back to the 50s and and makes me wonder if I should take up snorting coke off my stovetop, but whatever. I'm just thinking it's nice.

So nice that I thought I'd share this with you - The Summer Menu - and the concept of Summer Menu making. Just in case you have similar vegetables piling up and want to rotate them out each week into someone's belly instead of the composter or trash.

The handy part is that all these things are pretty quick to make, don't require much beyond that which lives in your fridge or pantry and do well as leftovers even if they're smushed into a Tupperware and biked 15 miles to work.

Plus! They don't taste like ass. At least we don't think they do.

Extra fun bonus - there are 6 things on this menu so one for each night of the week that isn't Pizza Night. Because you know that Friday night is Pizza Night at our house and thou shalt not fuck with Pizza Night.


The Summer Menu
White Bean Kale and Pasta & Roasted Green Beans
Mexican Grilled Whole Chicken, Pinto Beans & Green Salad
Meatballs with The Best Sauce Ever. Yep. & Fennel Orange Olive Salad
Chicken Salad with Arugula & Garlic Naan (na-na-na-na-nanana-na)
Broccoli Walnut Pasta with Bacon or Prosciutto
Big Ass Cobb Salad & Garlic Toasts (no egg for Bubba)

Some explanation...
White Bean Kale and Pasta & Roasted Green Beans 
This requires no explanation because I've covered it in great detail around here. However, I will say that the new french style green beans I'm growing this year are THE MOST and will be enhancing this menu item all summer because they are long and skinny even when they're old so won't require extra stomachs to manage the harvest. Last summer there were a lot of beans is what I'm saying. I could have used extra stomachs. Like a cow has. But I didn't want to equate myself to a cow. Obviously.

Mexican Grilled Whole Chicken, Pinto Beans & Green Salad
This is new this year and requires some awesome brutality to accomplish. I, for one, love to lay a good beat down on my meal before eating it, which I assume is the same for everyone.

If you're a wuss with raw chicken, handling raw chicken, hacking bones and the like - stop being a fucking puss and make this. It will be worth all your girlish squealing. Promise.

Ingredients:
One whole chicken (our pastured local organic chickens are so fucking delicious, but I won't judge anyone for their Foster Farms. I'm very accepting.)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Hot sauce (Tapatio, Cholula, Frank's Hot Wing sauce - you do what you need to do)
Corn or flour tortillas
Green salad makings
1 can of pinto beans, rinsed

To make:
Rinse and pat your chicken dry. Which is not as sexy as it sounds. Feel free to give your chicken one last dance before you beat its ass. I always do.

Then, using kitchen shears or a kick ass sturdy knife, cut the breastbone of the chicken from the bottom up. Yeah, that's right - you're cutting through bone. It's extreme.

Now that your chicken's split, grab the breasts and pull them apart until they crack. That'd be the back bones breaking. WEE! You're brutal.

Flip that bird over, spread the breasts apart (Not Sexy ALERT) and break the spine until the chicken lays flat and accommodating on your cutting board. Snip the skin around the thighs away so that the breasts will spread out nicely and not tuck underneath the thighs. (I doubt that sounds sexy.)

Rub the whole thing down with olive oil and a healthy coating of salt and pepper. You could probably do a lime tequila thing here with the marinade, like all those fruity ridiculous TGIWhatever places do when trying to Mexican-ize chicken, but I find that all to be too much. Salt, pepper, olive oil, grill. That's plenty.

So, now you grill. Lay that beautiful flat bird meat side down (bones up) on a hot grill and cook with the lid on for about 15 minutes. Flip it over and cover for another 15 minutes. Flip it over again and cook covered until juices run clear. And, since you're going to chop it all up anyway, feel free to slice into that thigh to see if it's cooked through like I know you want to.

Look, I know professional chefs frown upon this from up on their super high horses, but I'm just a chicken scarfing psychopath playing cook in my backyard, so I can just slice into whatever the hell I want as long as it's not a guest, the dog or Bubba. Hell yeah! I'm a chicken ninja! Zing zing zing!

Where the hell did that come from?

When the chicken's done, throw a bunch of tortillas on the grill and then cut up the chicken into legs, breasts, wings and so on and set it out with a big pile of warm tortillas that you just tore off the grill. And hot sauce. And cilantro fresh from the garden if you happen to be sitting right by the garden. And limes.

And the pinto beans that I mentioned earlier that you just heat up in a pot on the grill or stovetop while the chicken's cooking. And that green salad I mentioned earlier, made however a normal person might make green salad.

I can't help you with everything.


Meatballs with The Best Sauce Ever. Yep. & Fennel Orange Olive Salad
I know everyone's got their own way of making meatballs, so I'm not going to pass my simple and probably wrong recipe for meatballs off as the best or anything, but they're good and Bubba loves them a lot and you can find those details in this post where I made him a white trash dinner that will further illustrate how I'm not a professional chef.

You don't need me recounting The Best Sauce Ever. Yep. because I've told that story. And you can read it here. Along with a variety of conflicting comments.

The salad has been documented before, too, but I called it something else and used kumquats instead of oranges, but you'll get the gist. And hey, really, the thing should be called "Fennel Orange Onion Olive Salad" anyway, so that all the ingredients are actually just in the damn name, but someone probably told the author of this cookbook that the name was too long and to cut out her least favorite vegetable and so she decided she liked the onion least of all. Which is a crime because onions are THE BEST. 


Chicken Salad with Arugula & Garlic Naan (na-na-na-na-nanana-na)
The chicken salad recipe is around here, too, and I usually just get some naan from a nearby Indian restaurant or GASP from Trader Joe's, give it a brush of olive oil and then throw on some sea salt and chopped herbs and garlic to be fancy.

Because obviously I'm very fancy with my Trader Joe's naan to begin with.

Broccoli Walnut Pasta with Bacon or Prosciutto
I can't believe I've never talked about this dish, which is a total mainstay in our kitchen because I get to blow out a lot of broccoli before it turns repulsive in my fridge, but that's probably because it's about as photogenic as horse poo.

Meanwhile, it is delicious and improved dramatically with the addition of prosciutto (if you're fancy) or bacon (if you're us).

Ingredients
As many cups of broccoli florets as you have on hand (I usually have about 6)
1 cup of walnut pieces
1/4 lb chopped bacon
1 cup whole wheat pasta
1/2 shredded Parmesan
2 cloves chopped garlic
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

To make:
Preheat the oven to 400.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with foil (or, if you're not a big fat waster like me, just throw it on the pan and then spend the rest of your natural life scraping broccoli off that pan), add some olive oil to the pan and throw on the broccoli, bacon and walnuts and toss them in the oil. Add some salt and pepper. Roast in the oven for 10 minutes, take it out to toss and then finish in the oven for another 10 minutes or until the walnuts begin to darken.

Just don't burn the god damned walnuts because it ruins the whole thing and makes it all bitter and sad. And you won't have enough of everything to remake it anew and will end up eating popcorn that you managed NOT to burn and Bubba will eat chips and look sad all night.

Make the pasta and toss in the roasted broccoli mix and then the Parmesan. Add more salt if you like. Hell, add Velveeta if you like, it's already been bastardized with beautiful bacon, why not go for the friggen gold, here? (Warning: I've never tried this and I'm not even sure Velveeta qualifies as a food. Take your own chances.)

Big Ass Cobb Salad & Garlic Toasts (no egg for Bubba)

Yeah, I doubt I really need to tell you how to make a cobb salad. Though, if you're not familiar with cobb salad let me tell you how I see it: A cobb salad is all the food you'd want to have on a sandwich, except you put it on greens, call it salad and then don't feel like a fat ass.

It's great.

Just don't skimp on the blue cheese (and, no, I will not be spelling it as "Bleu cheese" because I'm not a complete douche) or bacon. And since tomatoes are out of season right now, I like to sub in sundried tomatoes packed in oil because they're delicious, but you could sub in some sliced peaches, apricots or plums and I promise it won't be grotesque. Try marinated olives instead of those sad grey rounds from the red can and see how happy you get.

To make the garlic toasts, just slice a small baguette in half, rub the cut sides with the cut side of a fresh clove of garlic, brush on a bit of olive oil and some sea salt and toast until nice and golden.

It's pretty awesome for dinner, particularly if you're having a beer or some Chardonnay from your recent trip to Paso Robles.

Alright - so that's all the Summer Menu knowledge I have right now. In the event that I'm able to document the grilled chicken scenario without losing my camera in the Frank's sauce or happen to catch the Broccoli Walnut Pasta in a flattering light (darkness), I'll come back and post those photos. Or maybe I'll write up new posts because in the event those things happen, they're going to represent small miracles in my world and will have to be documented appropriately.

Geez - the things that count as miracles these days.I've really lowered the bar.

Gardenblahblahblah goes purple

Dudes! It's been a really long time since I did the gardenblahblahblah and wow are there things to blahblahblah about. Garden-wise, anyway.

Last we met, I think I was worried about the potatoes dying a strange and mysteriously bug-free death for no reason. Yes, that was it. Well, I received some helpful advice from that post which I took as, "Hey, smartie, those plants aren't diseased, they're dying back. As in - the potatoes are getting ready for you to eat. So stop freaking out. Loser."

Even though I'm sure that's not what cake meant when she left the comment, but this is how I interpret things when I go on the internet to research their viability and then WHOA am faced with the truth of the situation. That being that my plants look exactly like the ones in the photos I found which are photos of potatoes dying back and preparing to be harvested.

OH.

So, they're small and the photo's out of focus. What do you want? Also remember, these are fingerlings, so they're supposed to be small.

Thank you, cake, for the direction. Muchly appreciated.

So, because I was so sure that this was the case with my Not Actually Dying potatoes, I went out and dug a few up. And don't you know that they were fine. Not huge, but tasty and fine. We ate them with some fish and beans and squash last Sunday and called ourselves Healthy for the night even though we had gone on a Taco Ride earlier in the day and scarfed our body weight in tacos al pastor.

Not important! Now we're eating vegetables and are saved.

Sorta Potato Salad. Recipe forthcoming.

And since we didn't die, I'm calling it good on the potatoes. Though you may be interested to know that NOW they are blooming and their greenery is growing back in places, so part of the plant may be having a mid-life crisis and part of it may be dying back, but soon all of it is going to get knocked over so that the Deal Seeing can be done.

As in, "What's the fucking deal, here, potatoes?"

You know.

And then there's the tomatoes. We have no problems with the tomatoes except for the fact that it's T minus 3 days until 4th of July, our annual First Tomato of the Season eating day, and none of the tomatoes are ripe. Because of the super extra cool, rainy and FRUSTRATING spring.

I'd be all pissed off and on fire if this one didn't look like it was starting to ripe right now.

Trust me. It's turning orange-y on that fat part in the front there. Really.

Beauty is that there are manyMANY more tomatoes on those three plants (down one from last year), so we should have plenty of tomatoes this season as long as my newest garden nightmare (which I have because I'm a garden loser) doesn't come true. That being - I walk out to the garden and find a stranger pointing at the plants, which are suddenly brown and lifeless, yelling, "Blight! Blight!"

I woke up screaming. Obvi.

And then I had to explain my "problem" to Bubba and then I started screaming again. It was terrible.

Anyway, I immediately went out to check on the plants and they all look fine. Green and not ripe, but fine otherwise.

Phew.

Then I had the nerve to go poking around the cucumber plants and LO there was a monster lurking in there.

"Why, hello deh, purty lady."

Not sure how he managed to get so huge since all the other baby cucumbers are baby-sized, but there he was, just dangling there like he was waiting for his fluffer or something.

And did you know that my green beans are purple? They are. And it's not even the result of some fucked up trick by the camera or anything. They are purple pole beans, growing all cute and happy alongside my Kentucky Wonder green beans and I can now vouch for their deliciousness because we've eaten them twice and neither time did they taste like fake grape even though that's what they look like they should taste like.

What?

Grilled Purple Beans recipe forthcoming, too.

Never mind. The important things to note with these beans are:

• They're purple rather than green.
• Their flowers are pink rather than white.
• When you cook them they turn back to green.
• The purple doesn't rub off.
• They're green on the inside

You laugh, but people have asked about all these things.

And now that you've learned so much in one day, I give you all permission to have a cocktail on me. Or just go on about your day. Enjoy.

Instead of wool, you get beans

I had intended to be finished with Bubba's sweater by now and be all ready to show it off you to with its seamless seams and fancy ass hems and all, except that I foiled my own plans again and managed to run out of yarn halfway through the hem of the sweater.

Now the thing is all rolling hems and collar and cuffs I can't be showing that to y'all because, ew.

To me, nothing says Amateur Hour like rolled hems, cuffs and collar. Even though I've made items for myself with such hems, cuffs and collars - that's OK. That's what I was going for. The whole Matrix look and all.

But with Bubba's sweater, I'm not so much going for the look of "Civilization has evaporated and this is all they had left on the Nebuchadnezzar" as I am the look of "Hey I might have bought this sweater in a store that sells clothes to people."

This is really one time that I want a garment to be worn in public and not receive the, "Hey did your wife make that?" comment.

SO - until such a time comes, when I can present this sweater to you with appropriate cuffs, collar and hem - you get beans.

Which, even in Bubba's opinion, is OK. Because what are we going to do with wool sweaters in June, anyway? Beans are way more useful.

See, our tepee is quite active. It's also beginning to list slightly in one direction where the tippy top beans have gotten more dense on one side than the other, so I may begin panicking or propping the tepee up soon, depending on how dramatic the list becomes.

Right now, the list is happening more on a Big Ben level than a Tower of Pisa level, but with sun in the forecast, things could change pretty quickly. Especially if all the beans on the heavy side all grow at once in the sunny days to come.

Yikes.

It's good for the Garden Tracker, though, because green beans aren't cheap when you get them organic and local and all, so big yields mean we hit zero barrier on the budget sooner. And now I'll stop using bizarre semi-Sci-Fi references so we all can know what I'm talking about.

Basically, it also means we get to eat beans sooner. And more often. And just the way we like them. Which is to say, roasted simply with extra virgins and some sea salt.

And here we have the #1 batch of roasted green beans alongside homemade falafel.

I've heard a rumor that my wool is being shipped to me today, so perhaps I will be able to show you something un-rolly in a few weeks' time. If not, I'm sure there will be more beans.

And maybe cucumbers? I TEASE!

I still do dumb shit

Yeah, don't let those straight As mislead you, folks. I do just as much dumb shit now as I did before I was laying down straight As like a big fat nerd.

And now the dumb shit I do, particularly that which applies to the garden, is ever the more dumb given that I'm actively being educated on how to do it right.

Don't tell my clients.

So yeah, I MASTER fucking planned my summer garden. As in, I nerded THE FUCK OUT over the winter planning not only the summer garden and managing the winter garden but also tucking in an early spring garden to boot.

I WAS SO ON IT that I probably even dreamed about it, though I have no recollection to that effect. But I can imagine it happening. Especially since I spent the majority of my waking hours that weren't dedicated to school or work on it.

And then I went right ahead and, when the weather was warm enough and the transplants had grown out from seed enough and were perfectly ready to transplant into the garden, I carefully MASTERFULLY constructed this year's summer garden with its special trellises and net supports and staking and tepeeing (not like TPing, obviously WHY DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS SHIT?) so that everything would just be ever so happy and grow ever so tall/wide/over plants that needed shade/etc.

Your perfect growing environment awaits, plants. SO GET TO IT.

And then I went ahead and planted bush beans in the very sacred real estate on the bean tepee that would have been really extra nice to use for more pole beans but I thought that OH NO there isn't enough space and this year the dry beans (cannellini) and green beans (Fortex) will just each have one side and done. I'll live with just a dozen of each plant, but it'll be OK because those pole beans will do just fine with one on one side and the other on the other.

Which would have worked great if they were both pole beans. Ahem.

All was going super well until oh hello these look like bush beans happened just a few stupid weeks into the summer growing season.

Oh.

Yeah.

Well, I went back and forth to High Mowing Seeds a hundred times (ok, like three times) at least to check and make sure that the Silver Cloud Cannellini Beans that I'd ordered were pole beans and I swear on my Hula Hoe that those fucking beans were pole beans but no.

They are not.

My powers of delusion must really be getting good because I swears it that when I checked the first three times, it totally said "Pole" and then once I knew deep down in my heart that they were really bush beans (since they weren't climbing the tepee that I'd so conveniently put right next to them - rude), I went back to the site for the fourth time and, oh sad, "upright bush habit" is right there.

So, I'm an idiot.

I have bush beans growing right next to the tepee lines perfect for pole beans and BOO I don't have enough pole beans growing.

So I put in a pole bean annex and planted more pole beans. Even though it's going to take them forever to climb it and the likelihood that I'm going to get a bumper crop out of that annex is pretty nill, I don't even care.

Everyone, this is the Bean Annex. Bean Annex, this is everyone.

It made me feel better.

And picking the first batch of dry cannellini beans made me feel a little bit better again.

And so now I'm ready to talk about my dumb ass, so here I am.

Also, the rest of the garden is FUCK YEAH.

Ever so soon I will be screaming like a god damned psycho when these Paul Robesons ripen.

The tomatoes cleared their 6' cages about two weeks ago and show no signs of doing anything but going for the sky.

This is 1/50th of my basil plants because I don't know how to stop planting basil.

The Jaune Flamme tomatoes are thisclose to ripe now. THISCLOSE.

Volunteer sunflowers are always welcome in my yard. Even if they act like idiot teenage girls all HEY LOOK AT ME WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I've already harvested so many pounds of cucumbers (these are Boothby Blonde) and made so many pickles that, yeah, whoa.

From these, too. National Pickling, I think. Or Homemade Pickles.

This sunflower was sent home for drinking on the job. Clearly.

And my lack of control doesn't just apply to basil. I have over a dozen pepperoncini, jalapeno, ancho and habanero plants because why the hell not.

This year, there will be grapes. SO MANY CONCORD GRAPES. 

My brutal thinning of the apples in the spring has resulted in the chubbiest Gravenstein apples ever.

At least we get a few pole beans. 

As always, these ungrateful fucks are looking for more room.

The ever present kale is...ever present.

SO MANY LANTERNS. And now, so much salsa verde. YES.

Did I mention that I'm growing a lot of basil? I am. There's a lot.

This was the first moment that the cucumbers escaped their beds. Now it's YIKES.

I've told you that I'm growing hops right? I am. These are them - Cascades.

Tell me you don't want to flick that tomato nipple. JUST TRY AND TELL IT TO ME. I won't believe you.

Why yes. The tomatoes did eat their cages awfully fast.

RIPEN ALREADY, DAMN YOU.

So, at least I did some things right.