I mentioned this has been an odd summer. No tomatoes due to f*&^ing deer. Very little yellow squash. Plumb forgot to plant okra. More eggplant than you can shake a stick at. Ditto zucchini. And then there are the bush beans.

I have been growing bush beans for many more years than I care to count. I’ve never seen anything like this.

Everyone knows what gets planted two weeks after the last frost date. Everyone also knows that most of those veggies germinate in 5-7 days, take a few weeks to get going, and you’re picking in about 50 or so days. Everyone also knows that you pick for about three to four weeks or so and then, as the summer has heated up and the nights are warm, things begin to trail off. You can coax another week or two out of many things but that’s it.

We finished putting up the last of the zucchini in the form of 15 loaves of zucchini bread on July 8th. Typical for Mississippi. And that should have been after the time the beans were finished. It also indicates that I planted these things the last week of April.

It is August 20th– 16 weeks since I planted!– and I’m getting ready to freeze more beans. Mind, through all of those weeks there were very few beans to pick until about a week or so ago. A few yellow beans for salads, and I think one meal.

What happened? I have no idea. My knowledge of biology is fairly good. I know this b/c I just finished throwing away seven years’ worth of post-graduate biology-related stuff that had my name on it. Plus, growing veggies is not rocket science, despite what the experts insist. It ain’t even HAM radio science. I am absolutely clueless.

Temperature. Water. Sunlight. Plus some N-P-K, and some minors. Which among these factors and their interactions differed so much so for beans, but yet didn’t affect the zucchini?