Vaxed Beans: The Victory Garden Makes a Comeback

Chalk it up to city girl-ism, but I've never been much of a gardener.

Still, I was interested to see  an article in The Economist about how Victory Gardens are back in vogue, both as a way of coping with the recession and as a way of being a bit greener about the food we eat. If the food's coming from your Victory Garden, it's being transported from garden to table in a trug, not a fuel guzzling, pollution spewing, blow-out creating truck. And what with the poison peanut, death-by-spinach, and other food recalls of recent years, safety's another factor promoting the return to growing your own.

According to the article I read, there is a grassroots movement to have the Obamas follow in Eleanor Roosevelt's footsteps and plant a garden on the White House lawn. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is doing a reverse Joni Mitchell, unpaving the parking lot next to the Ag Department HQ, and putting up the paradise of "The People's Garden." Sounds a tad USSR, but the idea is interesting.

Arkansas is something of an epicenter for Victory Gardening, which:

...are springing up in backyards, school grounds and even on front lawns in posh neighbourhoods. Many gardeners are focusing on “heirloom” plants—rare varieties from earlier times that do not appeal to agribusiness.

Classes are being offered on canning vegetables and raising chickens.

Somehow, I don't see chickens taking off around here. It makes sense in Arkansas, where it's probably pretty easy to find chickens who've flown the Tyson's coop scratching around looking for a home where they don't have to wear blinders and sit in tiny cage all day sucking down growth hormones.

There are programs in Little Rock for gardening next to schools, so that "inner-city students [get] to taste fresh-grown fruit and vegetables, sometimes for the first time in their lives," which seems like a good idea. There's also a project focusing on getting inner-city families to start gardens.

As with chickens, this probably makes more sense in Little Rock, which has a somewhat longer growing season than Boston does.

But certainly people with backyard space in these parts can and do grow their own veggies.

As I said, I don't see myself as much of a gardener, victory or otherwise.

My mother - raised on Chicago, but born on the farm - had a green thumb, but she turned it to house plants and flowers, not veggies. One spring, the Big Three (i.e., the three oldest kids) each planted something or other. My choice was Scarlet Runner Beans, which no doubt chose because I had had scarlet fever over the winter. They had kind of a pretty flower, and the beans looked cool. As far as I was concerned, they weren't edible.

I can't remember what my sister Kath planted, but I know that my brother Tom did carrots.

Farmer Tom did a fine job cultivating them. Once the green sprouts appeared above ground, he took to digging them up every day to see how they'd grown.

As I said, city kids.

There are Victory Gardens in the Fens section of Boston, leftovers from WWII, and I've always enjoyed walking through them, but have never had the urge to actually apply for a plot of my own - which I probably wouldn't qualify for anyway, since I don't live in that neighborhood/neighbourhood.

I do plant tulips and crocuses out front of our condo building each year, but the area's very shady once the dogwood tree in there pops, so the only thing that grows there once June rolls around are impatiens. Besides, I don't imagine the neighbors would like to see tomato plants out front of our house. The back "yard" is sunny enough, but it's all concrete. I suppose I could grow tomatoes in buckets, but I suspect that the rats would get them.

Rats!

I will never be a victory gardener.

My Chicago grandmother, however, did grow vegetables at The Lake, our name for her summer house on the aptly named Sand Lake, which was out in The Country, up near the Wisconsin border. When we were kids, this truly was The Country; now it's a suburb.

I don't really recall everything that Grandma grew, but what sticks in my mind (as well as in the craw of my memory) was her waxed beans. Or, as she pronounced it, vaxed beans.

As far as I could tell, they really were made of vax.

If the strategy of hiding them under potato skin failed, there was only one way to eat them, or, rather gag them down.

You had to take a big mouthful of milk, pop in a vaxed bean or two, and let the milk with floating bean pass down your gullet in one big swallow. No need to chew, no need to taste. The trick was not having the bean actually touch any part of your mouth or throat. And not to see if any of your siblings or cousins were having a hard time getting them down. One gagging kid was all it would take to start a chain reaction of yelling mothers and milk streaming down all those nostrils.

Although I retain my aversion to vaxed beans - my gut is churning a bit as I type - I'm generally a fresh veggie type of gal these days. I suppose if someone actually put a vaxed bean in front of me, I would enjoy them

Still, if I had a victory garden, the vaxed bean would be one of the last things I'd plant in it. But tomatoes, scallions, lettuce, green beans, peas....even Scarlet Runner Beans. Yum!