Harper and the bean stalk

A couple of months ago, Harper decided to sprout a bean. She got an old baby food jar, a wet paper towel, and a few pinto beans from the cake pan where we keep the barley and beans we use sometimes for playing and general mess making. They did nothing at all for quite a while, then they did Something Rather Impressive. They sprouted and sprouted and got very tall. Then the Daddy helped to plant them in a pot. They got even taller and then, Lo! a bean pod appeared! Just the one, but exciting nonetheless. Since it's a lovely and rather shockingly cool day here in Houston, we decided to harvest the pod and then replant it, along with some other sprouts she's been cultivating. So, the moment of The Big Harvest of A Single Bean Pod:

Please note Harper's chocolate (soy) milk mustache and her gray hoodie which she insisted on wearing unibomber style because of the extreme cold (it was around 60 degrees probably) and also the fact that a yellow frog was somehow necessary for the process. While she carefully extricated the TWO white beans inside the pod I wondered in my head how bean farmers can possibly make a living when it seems you only get two beans for every one sprout. Then we headed to the backyard to chose a place to begin our special special bean patch. I could only find one gardening implement, and I'm not sure what it's called. It's kind of like a shovel/hoe hybrid. I figured I needed to till the very neglected soil in the flower bed and so I lifted up the shovoe and brought it down with considerable force. Nothing happened. We're in the midst of a drought here, you see. So, we watered. And made some mud. And tried the shovoe again. It went down about an inch. So, we watered some more. It took about 45 minutes to finally get a soupy, muddy, yet somehow still dusty mixture that looked as though it might sustain plant life. In the meantime, Helena was darting all over the yard, enjoying herself immensely, at one point swinging around a newspaper bag full of dog poo, presumably pretending it was some sort of balloon. Hudson was helping by digging in the mud with a big stick. Harper helped by complaining every time I asked her to go turn the water off or on, then by grabbing a handful of the shovoed mud mixture and forming it into a ball which she declared to be "better than Play-doh!" So, an hour and a half of work, and behold the impressive results:


I think I shall go enjoy a few quiet moments in the hammock.