Fiction

Homegrown Food

Setting: real world
Genre: Slice of Life/Humour
Summary: It's harvest time for the vegetable patch, and the beans have been doing particularly well.
Notes/warnings: none
Words: 298

The summer before had been dark and rainy, making for slim harvest in Betty’s garden. So this year she had planted extra of everything.

After a summer that alternated bright days with nourishing rain, everything grew like crazy — beans more than everything else put together.

Anya, Betty’s daughter, was soon sick of helping to harvest the sticky pods, trimming the green beans and wax beans, and shelling the kidney beans, conserving the one in old jam jars and switching baking pans of the other out from the oven on low to speed up drying.

“We don’t really have to eat beans every day until next harvest season, do we?” She asked plaintively, accepting another tray full of jars for her to put on the downstairs pantry shelves.

“Beans are good for you. A lot of protein.”

“A lot of farts, too.”

Betty snickered.

“Seriously, no-one will want to get near me. ‘That’s the fart girl. She lives on beans and cabbage. Stay away.’” The white cabbage had done so well that there were plans for experiments for homemade sauerkraut. It made Anya shudder.

“You’ll be the healthiest girl in school!”

“Mum! Stop making fun of me!”

Betty hugged her daughter around the shoulders and kissed her temple. “Stop worrying. This is too much for us; we’ll give away quite a bit of it. Aunt Mildred will love them as a gift, Mrs Fletcher wants to trade for pasta sauce and chestnuts…”

“All right.” The offer of chestnuts mollified Anya somewhat. Seeing her mother pull a box full of hoarded, empty jars from the shelves, where they had sat for as long as Anya could remember, did not. “Is there no end to the beans?”

“Not any time soon,” Betty said cheerfully, drawing a groan from her daughter.

Comments

I wish I had a harvest like that. Not beans, though but tomatoes and berries.

Happens occasionally, from what I've seen in my mother's garden. Good luck with the harvest this year! :)

What a lovely scene! I love beans and white cabbage (and yum, sauerkraut especially), but yeah, they're not so much fun on their way out.

Haha! XD

My diet experiments attest to both the protein and fart promises of beans. What a thing to have to sustain oneself upon!

What we don't do for science... :D

Oh, your story took me back to my childhood of endless gardening and harvesting. My father was the Garden Club President of our hometown and in charge of two large, very productive gardens which always produced in massive quantities. There was always something to do.
Great story, I can resonate with her daughter, have a great day!

Thank you! I've got people with at least occasionally overly productive gardens in my family, too, so that's where I know the general principle from.