O, Fava Rites

 

 

Fava bean flowers

Two short summers ago, I sat with her at the Polish witch poet’s kitchen table, and we filled our mouths and souls with a giant bowl of cooked fava beans doused in lemon juice and chunks of feta cheese. It was heavenly. I licked my empty bowl, when she wasn’t looking.

The Polish witch poet lives up the hill through the woods from me, and she’s a fava bean whisperer. She usually has ripe fava beans in her garden before my fava plants are even thinking about flowering; she has fava beans that fill the pods to bursting; she has fava beans in quantities I look at with jealous eyes and withering heart. She is a Fava Bean Goddess. I’m in awe.

Not this year, though, and I’m sure it’s not that she’s lost her witchy powers. I’m pretty sure her talent with fava beans has nothing to do with being a witch or a poet; I’m pretty sure she doesn’t cast spells on the plants. Besides, her witchiness has more to do with a herd of turkeys and some mourning doves, but that’s another story. And – after all – poets all have to be at least a little bit witchy. Being a poet does…things…to your brain.

No. This year the Weather Gods, who have to co-operate with the Fava Bean Goddess,  took exception to our desires for a nice, productive summer and have done their best to thwart our gardens and twist our brains, trash our fondest hopes and plant bitter nightmares in our hearts. If only we knew upon whom to wreak revenge…we’d parboil them and store them for the winter in the chest freezer in the cellar, in which there will be plenty of room after this truly unharvestable summer.

Thyme in bloom

Fava beans are odd beasts: they like being planted in cool ground, and germinate and grow best in cool weather, so they usually go out to be planted with the peas. They produce tall thick, twisty square stalks, with black-and-white flowers that grow in clumps on the stalks. The pods, which can get very long and very fat if the weather and garden environment is right, grow straight up towards the sky; and on the inside of its pod, the bean, which looks a little like a lima bean that’s been worked hard and put away wet, and which can get quite large, like three or four times the size of a typical lima bean and possibly much  larger, is nestled in a bed of white, soft, bedding that resembles, to some extent, airy Styrofoam – until you touch it, and then it melts away. When allowed to mature fully and dry on the stalk, the beans turn yellow and are huge – the dried beans we plant are often the size of my last thumb joint.

This year, even the Polish witch poet is having little luck with her fava beans. Here at mid-August, my fava beans are finally producing a few pods – I get maybe 5 or 6 every couple of days - nowhere near enough to do the wonderful thing with. I‘ve been sticking them in the freezer, in the same bag as the peas, which also were very, very late and not very abundant.

Where the whisky is now

The weather has been – that’s about all I can say about it. The garden has barely been. Even the garden gnomes/gremlins haven’t been very active this year; they don’t seem to like being out in the rain any more than I do. One released skunk smell right under the dining room window four nights in a row, when I was working there late into the evening, so they are still being obnoxious. They’ve moved the bottle of whisky I left out for them around a bit, but haven’t made it disappear, and they haven’t figured out how to open it. Temperance leprechauns, maybe?

So far, half-way through August,  here’s the garden list:

The peach and pear and half the apple blossoms got zapped by the late frost;

More than half the beets didn’t germinate, and of those that did, one batch produced some early greens then gave up – they have no root ball and their leaves are 2.5 inches tall; and another bunch produced 9 beets; 

Mountain Ash berries

I’ve had 10 ripe cherry tomatoes; and 3 ripe regular-size tomatoes, each from individual plants. Once two of those plants produced their one fruit, they immediately died. Other tomato plants never got thick but got very long hunting for sun, and none have more than 4 green fruits on it; good thing, since they aren’t sturdy enough to support any more than that.

In the bed out back that we remade in June and filled with the compost that came out of the haunted compost bin that the gremlins/gnomes overwintered in, a tomato plant that I didn’t plant has appeared, and it’s the healthiest of the many other pitiful plants in my garden. Many things I didn’t plant in that bed are growing in it – it’s going to be interesting to see what they are;

Another new bed, also filled with magic compost, has produced some massive borage plants, the size of a usual healthy tomato plant…at least, I think it’s borage, it hasn’t actually bloomed yet;

The cucumber vine is happily climbing the sunflowers and has lots of flowers but no cukes;

The pepper plants have no fruits;

The summer squash and the zucchini plants produced one fruit each, which stopped growing at 4 inches. I ate them;

Heron solar light

One pumpkin plant died, the other winter squashes have flowers but no fruit;

The blueberries, onions, shallots, and garlic are doing beautifully; most the garlic and shallots and half the onions are already harvested and drying. Something has eaten the entire bulb of 4 onions, 2 garlics, and 2 leeks – all below ground leaving perfect leafy parts above ground;;

Most the lettuce, and the spinach, didn’t germinate;

I’ve had 4 kohlrabis;

The green beans and yellow beans finally produced, but started to mold almost immediately;

One of my tarragon plants, vigorous in the spring, recently gave up the ghost; and the summer savory hasn’t blossomed;

The California poppies and the daisies, and the golden rod and milkweed, and the Lady’s Thumb and Joe Pye weed, and yarrow and clover and other wild flowers, have been massively happy;

Mother’s Wort and a strange wild bupleurum have appeared in my garden – unplanted – and done beautifully, the Sweet Woodruff has been traveling, but the Egyptian onions are unhappy;

The heather is glorious;

Heather in bloom

 

And on it goes. My freezers are going to be sadly mostly empty this winter, alas.

Every summer is different, and this one is definitely different! At least we’re out of the drought; and we hope for a long, warm autumn so the pollinators have time to build their winter stores. Buzzy Boy and his kind have been sucking a lot of sugar water, and he is personally guarding the scarlet runner beans, which are finally blooming – quite possibly too late to produce beans, unless we have a long warm autumn. And I’m keeping an eye on a potato plant that something – gnome, gremlin, something with a good arm – tossed out of the potato bags (those did well but finished early and are drying and curing under the dining room table) this spring and planted in one of the raised beds. I’m wondering what, if anything, it’ll produce.

Rabbit foot clover

And now, at this very moment, the sun is out again, between storms. Lynxie and I are going to go take a nap. He will dream of catnip – which is doing very well this year; and I will lean back and let my mind drift to the Polish witch poet’s kitchen, and a phantom bowl of fava beans with lemon and feta cheese, which if I reach out slowly, I can almost touch…

 

For the blog, 9 August 2023: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Deb Marshall

 

A new garden buddy, currently residing on the porch. Freaked the cats out at first, but now they've beaten it up, and no longer have to pay it any attention.