What goes around

How many scary movie scenes have involved a malevolent plant that persecutes a hapless human by twining itself around the victim and dragging it underground, or suffocating it, or perhaps just  holding it hostage, for fun and profit?  I admit nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I know I have seen such things on screen and even once had a mildly alarming dream of that nature.  It doesn't take much imagination to come up with the plant-as-predator scenario.  If I stood still long enough in our vegetable garden, something would eventually grab onto me and hold fast.

Rattlesnake beans

It's not every plant that give me this feeling, not tomatoes, or radishes, or carrots, or beets, or any of their close relatives.  Cucurbits (squash, melon, cucumber) and legumes (peas and beans) are the more, let's say, clingy types.  Pole beans cast about for something to wind themselves around, preferably more vertical than horizontal, and then start to grow very quickly.  This spring there was still a generous supply of Rattlesnake beans saved from three years ago.  I planted them all, unsure of their viability.  The pole structure has now disappeared and the vines are just twisting around each other as they carry on above and beyond the apex of the poles.  The first part of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk was also not a product of a fertile imagination, just everyday observation.  (I give the writer credit for thinking up a giant at the top of it, though.)  The Scarlet Runner beans a couple of meters away are doing the same thing.  If only they would head toward each other and form an arch of Scarlet Snake beans.  One plant still is not with the program and I have recently had to shoo it away from the rogue dill across the path.  That would have been a trip to nowhere because of my habit of suppressing the dill, but the dill was never going to be as tall as the sunflower poles anyway.   Reliable sources suggest some pole beans will grow more than ten feet. Less reliable sources have suggested eighteen feet.  We limit the ambitions of our beans to the range of my reach for picking.

Winding one's entire body around a pole several times seems like a pretty secure way to hold oneself in place.  Peas and cucurbits opt for planned redundancy instead.  Grab early, grab often.  Peas, more than cucurbits, are also into mutual support - you grasp my tendrils, I'll grasp yours.  My preference would be that they grasp the nice chicken wire fencing that Barry installed for them, but they have other ideas.  The shell peas climbed only about three feet and now just want to be in a big thick huddle where they can hide their pods from us.  The snow peas, on the other hand, support each other in growing upward beyond their five-foot cage structures.    Maybe the circular configuration is the way to go with peas.

upwardly mobile winter squash

confounding coils of
summer squash

Given the way winter squash vines travel, through the tomato bed and across the lawn, grasping onto whatever is available as they go, I figured they might like to try climbing and so put some wire fencing in place for a few of them.  It took a while for them to get going - the sudden vertical wall may have been a bit abrupt for them - but with a bit of coaching there are now three individuals (two Uncle Dan's Dakota Desert and one unkown) that have scaled the full height of the ladder and two others (Butternut) are getting started.  The sixth in that group is a zucchini that shows no climbing tendencies.  It has a different twisting behaviour.  The comparatively tiny Blacktail watermelons are growing like fans across a wire grid on the exterior of the greenhouse and the hanging cucumber is clinging to its own tendrils in an effort to avoid sinking any lower.

Meanwhile, grape vines are reaching out at a rate that's hard to keep up with.  They tend to grow out horizontally into absolutely nothing.  It must work in their native or usual habitat, but here they have to be trained, either twisted around or tied to another vine, until they find something to hold onto.  Barry ran a length of old clothesline around the exterior of the huge greenhouse window.  It looked ideal for grasping, to me.  The grape tendrils appear to prefer roof shingles and pepper plants.  If there is a report card, I get a C in "Anticipates the needs of others".


Some alliums also have that instinct for going in circles.  Remember the garlic scapes from July 15?  The follow-up to that is they have undone themselves.  Whether I cut off the seed head or let it be, the stems unwound into the shape of the crook on a shepherd's staff.  Perennial onions develop all sorts of odd and vaguely creepy configurations, and sometimes by accident end up doing loops.  This one appears to be children coming to visit a parent.


Went to the farmers' market on Saturday morning.  Looked at the produce displays.  Got it, got it, getting it soon, getting it soon, got it.....and so on.  Came home with only sausages and baking.  Cool.  Then I got to work in the garden.  After an hour I saw that I could give the entire day to removing unwanted life from the yard (the weeds in the garden beds are largely under control).  This was disheartening, as I have been hoping to get ahead with improvements rather than playing catch-up.  So I switched focus to the positive and utilitarian aspect of this whole project and harvested everything I could.  It was early to be pulling up onions and digging for potatoes, but they are totally edible and it made me feel better.  Last night we enjoyed beet greens, mixed summer squash, and Russian potato salad with the sausages.  (Confession - the potatoes were imported because I didn't want to sacrifice any more large potatoes of the future.  But the delicious beets and dill were homegrown, as would have been the carrots had I followed the recipe properly.)

July 30 harvest