These Beans Tell You All You Need to Know About Gardening

This, my friends, is my black bean harvest. It is about three-fourths of a cup.

And these beans tell us all we need to know about gardening.

First, though some of us may appear to spend quite a bit of money on gardening, not all gardening costs money. I got the seeds for the plants that grew these beans for free from my local public library’s seed library.

If you look, you can find free resources for gardening everywhere. Where? Everywhere. Just keep your eyes open and hang out with other gardeners and you’ll be amazed what you can bring back to your garden without spending money.

Knowledge, seeds, cuttings, plants. For free!

Second, these black bean seeds teach us that though we might think we are out-working everyone in our own gardens, we cannot out-work the plants. Ever.

I planted just 10 black bean seeds to get this harvest. In one tiny three-foot row. Then I mostly ignored them until yesterday when I picked the dried pods and plucked out those black beans. Honestly, those beans almost shot out of those pods with just a slight tap or twist of the pod.

I haven’t counted my beans, yet, but you can see just from the picture that there are more than ten beans in my harvest. Way more. Maybe 200 beans? Maybe even more than that? What else gives you that kind of return for so little effort?

Gardening. Gardening gives you that much return for so little effort.

Finally, these beans show us that we can accomplish more than we think we can, if we have a garden. How else would accomplish the feat of turning 10 bean seeds into this big pile of beans? Gardening did that.

And that is all you need to know about gardening, brought to you by some beans.

Have you subscribed to my weekly newsletter, In the Garden with Carol? No? What are you waiting for? Give it a read and subscribe. It’s a peek into my week, in and out of the garden and comes out Sunday evenings. Sometimes, there are snippets of actual gardening advice, and sometimes, it’s about something outside of my garden, but I hope you find it a good read anyway!

What is this? Another newsletter? Remember? I told you that I was moving all my Lost Ladies of Garden Writing to a newsletter. And I did. It’s called, of all things, Lost Ladies of Garden Writing. I publish an article about a new author every other week. Last week, I wrote about Rosetta E. Clarkson. Have you heard of her? No? Guess you need to subscribe…

Thanks for reading to the end!