Well, since we were talking about a “less than successful” harvest with our corn yesterday, it’s probably time for us to breach the topic of total crop failure! We jokingly call these our “mighty harvests!” And, oh, how we completely failed at bush beans this year!
In case you didn’t get the “mighty harvest” reference, it’s from Reddit and a sub with that namesake. The subreddit is full of extremely tiny or ridiculously mediocre harvest pictures with people declaring hilarious things like “I shall feed the entire village” and “It looks like I’m set for winter!” It’s a good time if you’re into plant humor and celebrating those failures.
It was definitely the rain that got our beans, we’ve had over 17 inches since July alone. We’ve never had our green beans perform this poorly, at least in recent memory. Beans are one of those plants that really dislike outright soggy soils. Which, has pretty much been the descriptor for the entire second half of our summer!
Most of our bush beans were well on their way out by the time we harvested, some had checked out weeks ago. From 48 bush bean plants, we barely scraped by enough beans for a single side dish! We’re a bit sad as this means no dilly beans this year, but fortunately, we still have a few more jars put up from last season.
But, this is an excellent time to illustrate the wild seasonality and major challenges we can face growing in the north. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re a good grower or not. The season’s weather can absolutely cause some crop that would normally perform well to just…well, not.
Things like this do make us glad that we’re not required to grow in order to survive. A lot of folks romanticize the act of homesteading and self sufficiency. But, even in the days of “real” homesteading, a remarkable number of people failed at it. Perhaps even a majority of people who have tried their hand at it. Self sufficiency is extremely difficult, especially so anywhere with an extreme climate. Put simply, you are not always in the driver’s seat when it comes to success or failure.
But, we do think we are going to learn from this and try to improve things. We’ve been direct sowing bush beans pretty much forever and usually they do fine. But, I think next year we’re going to sow our beans about 3 to 4 weeks prior to last frost. This should ensure that our beans are coming in strong by late July, as opposed to mid August. We’ve been thinking about making this change for a few years now anyway, so this seems like a good impetus to do so.
One of the reasons we enjoy growing such a diversity of things is because it helps us spread our risks across seasonal conditions. In some seasons, warm loving crops will excel. In others, our cooler climate crops win. If you’re spread out across many different kinds of crops, with different tolerances towards weather conditions, you always win!
So, if you’ve had some failures this season, don’t beat yourself up about it! Even professional growers can fail, that’s quite literally what crop insurance is all about! And we wanted to show you that it can even happen to us!
