Monkeys Hate It When You Steal Their Beans

The other morning from the deck I shouted a solo monkey out of the garden, a female, not big but bigly disappointed at being rousted from her quiet (sneaky) moment in that peaceful, beanfilled, monkeyloving place. She climbed slowly back over the fence with that over-the-shoulder resignation that monkeys are so good at, because they really own everything. She was a scout; the troupe of beangrabbers would soon follow.

So I got my work duds on and went out there because I'd seen yesterday that there were lots of on-the-verge beans that would be ready now anyway. I opened the gate and walked in to check the damage, saw that there was none; the furry spy had been rousted before she could even nip a cuke-- she'd just memorized the inventory.

As I was going around double-checking the zooks and cukes and rows of climbing beans, nigglethinking what  a fool I am to grow such things in monkeyworld, I noted that the scout had remained nearby in simian confidence, sitting quietly in the shadows between the garden and the roadside trees, keeping an eye on her vegetables, feeling a bit proprietary toward her beans, just now at the front edge of their profusion (I had harvested a large bowlful of them yesterday in anticipation of just this sort of event, even though I'd seen only one stray monkey in the past 6 months). 

Seems monkeys are as punctual as bean caterpillars, which emerge hungry at precisely the time the beans are ready to feed them, a bug-bean arrangement finalized many eons ago, long before we learned to plant for our own purposes, despite bugs and monkeys. The bugs don't even bother to laugh at the thought that these are planted beans, and the monkeys don't care, they have the same sort of paleoagreement with the beans and the like: you grow it, we'll eat it. Pretty basic. Way unlike our Nietzschean struggles. 

It's in their genes; the earth's output is clearly their heritage, so in that sense she was sitting there watching me grab her beans and pluck them-- then not even eat them before another walker could get them, but put them in some kind of pointless container that interferes with climbing - What the hell for, she looked like she was thinking, stomachs are all you need... never understand these walkers - but I was bigger than she was, which is the way monkeys roll, bottom line - humans too, in more technological ways that include kill ratio and stopping power...

Once I started picking the beans, Scout finally gave up, ambled on out of the shadows, down the stone steps and across the road to the forest where she found a nice vantage tree and sat in it watching me through the leaves and uttering a regular sort of grieving sound, a single syllable moan, like those Italian grandmothers in my old NY neighborhood used to do when as outfielder I had to sometimes go over the fence into their kitchen gardens where there were the most delicious tomatoes in the world. Yes, I was a monkey in my younger days and this is all a form of karma, though I no longer grow tomatoes because I get so few of them, and none ever as delicious as those were...

Scout sat there continuously making that slow rhythmic lament all the while I went carefully along my net wall of her ready beans, taking for myself any beanpod that seemed large enough to catch a monkey's attention, because I knew that she was just being a sound marker, spotter, guide for the approaching troupe (which showed up before long), her eyes following my every move; a  companion of hers - male, probably retired, was not far away, breaking branches off an oak tree and throwing them onto the ground in a kind of bluster, which didn't work on me. There was much frustration in the air, except where I was.

The troupe arrived, as always with an unexpected flourish. About 20 minutes after gleaning the beans I was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee, keeping an eye on the garden, my bedding hanging out over the deck railing in the nooning sun, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a brown furry rocket leap from the cedar into the weeping cherry, thence with a whoosh down onto the deck railing, zip across my futon and from there into the plum tree, on into the bay tree and down to the ground, streaking for my garden. 

I looked out the big window and there was brown fur everywhere: there were mothers with newborn wee ones on their backs ambling along, slow loafing males who would get there after the harvest, midrange females just then sneaking over my garden fence but by then I was clacking a stone on the deck railing and whistling, shouting pretty nasty monkey curses and clapping my hands; tossed a rock or two and they all loped away to beyond rock distance, where they would wait until I went back inside my big box...

The word was getting around, though: there were no beans left. The troupe was buzzing; they couldn't believe I had taken their beans, and they were pissed: I could tell by the way they looked at me from the road, their faces an even angrier red than usual; they can't stand it when we steal their stuff.

RAISING VEGETABLES

Vegetables have been around longer than we have, you'd think by now they'd have figured out how to grow pretty much on their own. In the wild, they are indeed boss; too much so in some cases - kuzu finds an in and soon takes over. After generations of kitchy-koo domestication, though, the plants we call our vegetables can be a lot like children.

Gardeners must therefore now and then provide temporal guidance to our selectively bred green friends, who in their growth and development are prone to undesired tendencies that can accompany human preferences and require staking, training, shading, netting, fencing, heading, stringing up and so forth. Such guidance, however, should be administered with balanced judgment and tender interspecies diplomacy. You don't want a garden full of offended tomatoes or even worse, peppers. Lettuce, forget about it. 

The other day I spotted my newly emerged Climbing Bean tendrils just hanging around lowdown, looking for green action in an arm-over-the-shoulder kind of way with the Spinach, a family that can be bad company for vegetables that have been bred for higher aspirations.

I know from personal human experience, mutatis mutandis, that lowlifery in the early phase sets a bad precedent, and can tend to restrain upward ambition. If Climbing Beans remain too long in an earth-hugging relationship, they may never regain their full powers, never reach the heights to which their birthright entitles them. So without sounding too elitist about it, I had to take the gangly neophytes aside and, in the gentle language suitable to sprouts, give them good advice without bruising their spirits. 

There's an art to vegetal diplomacy. To the young but unstriving reachers, I said: "Listen here, greenies-- there are a few things you've got to learn about life. First of all, you've got to choose your companions wisely. Don't hang around with the groundhuggers-- no offense to you, Spinach, don't get all bolty. This isn't personal, it's gardening. You do your job well. We love you. You're tasty, you're nourishing, you're beautiful. Keep up the good work..."  (Gardeners often sound like Hollywood agents.) 

"But you, all you young beans, reaching with your tendrils: choose high-reaching companions! At your age, take all the help you can get! See those nets up there? Look for the net overhead and use it. Climb as high as you can and don't look back; grab a stake and keep on reaching! Believe me, the sky's the limit for you youngsters, so go for it with all you've got! You'll be blooming way up there in no time! That's your destiny!" 

And so I went on, a bit over the top, the green young tendrils hopefully hanging on my every word, though now that they've known the ease of Spinach life, I thought it wiser to lash them to the masts of ambition with plastic twists.

BEANS DON’T GRAB MY BAMBOO

Just out this blustery morning checking the bean plants, now about 30cm high and beginning to reach about, so into the soil beside each of them I inserted a selected mountain bamboo tip about a foot tall, after trimming off the multiple little branches down to an inch or so, providing a nice little sequence of easygrabbies up which the little bean plants can climb and hold against the wind to do their beanie max, but after 1 week I can see that they don’t care, they don’t give a damn, beans have no gratitude. But I knew that.

For some reason, the new beans ignore this valuable gift and just go scrabbling along, blown this way and that, looking for what, I don't know, an escalator? Is this a characteristic of modern young beans or has it always been like this? An even more disturbing thought is that maybe they’re like me when I was their age, all the obviously advantageous wisdoms and facilities around me and I ignored them for pennycandy fluffstuff I don’t even remember. Are there teen beans?

Gardeners can’t help but plummet down the rabbit hole of such thoughts when they behold the natural world from up close, first-hand, dirt-knuckled. They look at other gardens, as I do, in my local wanderings, here and there noting the little tricks gardeners use, like one I saw several days ago, of tying a tangly handful of upside down broomstraw to a stake above a bean plant for the beans to grab onto and climb.

Naturally I was impressed by that and will try it, just like when I saw a farmer use some cut mountain bamboo tips with the branches trimmed back to a few inches stuck in the ground above his bean plants so they could climb easily what a great idea, so at once I cut some of the mountain bamboo that grows so prolifically around my house it’s a pain - plus I love free stuff - so I stuck it in the soil above my bean plants and they just bent right past it, ignored it cold, like they ignored my dangling strings, my jerrybuilt trellises, my rough braided twine...

Those farmers and I are using the same beans; I should see what they use for discipline.

BEANPOD CONVERSATIONS

Out in the garden this morning, pausing in my work to wipe the old brow and have a sip of water, I happened to be standing before the armspread profusion of the bean plants reaching, in all their white, pink and purple emotion, for what was out there. They were in love with the air, with being all there is to be, right now, just like we humans try to do in our better moments - reaching for the light - and I just had to hunker in their shade to admire.

As I did so, a green arm offered me a fresh beanpod so I took it, popped it into my mouth and we started talking together the old language of bean and tongue, a language we both know well, of nourishment and primal flavors, existential nuances that beans and bodies have worked out together over the eons that got us here, in great part on bean nourishment.

It was good, that little miracle right then, me and the bright plants hunkering there, sharing a delve into the deep history pertaining between that crisp green gift, stemmed from soil, rain and sun upon a seed, and this tongue, practiced middleman for the bean-body relationship.

It was rich in countless ways, our little get-together-- bean and tongue conversing in crunches and savorings of matters far older than either of us, bean becoming the man who plants the bean, when another kindly offered me a fresh beanpod, in which there were savors of the earth, and water, and growth - the past was there too, in summer mornings... and the hint of tomorrow...

So there we were for a time in the morning, ancient familiars, conversing once more on the Big Subject...

BOB AND THE BEANSTALKS

This morning was nice and sunny so I spent some early time in the garden checking on the beans I planted in the autumn, staked with a bamboo lattice and covered with broad netting and fine mesh to protect them from the snow, thereby rendering them inaccessible and largely invisible.

I lifted off those layers and exposed the graphic reality of beanstalks and dirt left on their own for 3 months, saw that succulent weeds had sidled in from the cold to enjoy the warm serenity of beanworld, and that the beanstalks and the weeds had become good friends, the stalks rejecting my inviting bamboo framework in favor of base groveling, wrapping their tendrils around feckless weedery in the lowest form of companionship, the kind mothers warn their young teens about.

In order to free the beanstalks from their iniquity, that they might better to pursue the natural instincts of their breeding and reach the full bean potential that is their birthright, I had to break up these earthy relationships, and as I went along I saw in every instance - every instance, as though it were a completely natural thing - which I suppose, looking back on my own life, it is - that the beanstalks had preferred tendrilizing with the weeds, not in a single instance grabbing onto the convenient bamboo, over which in some cases the beanstalks had even grown downward to reach the weeds!

There beside them was offered a bamboo structure that would lift them to levels of which they were capable; that would elevate them to greater, sunnier, more productive heights, yet instead they leaned heavily toward their baser instincts, bent to the bottom of their world, acted against their own benefit and potentially toward their own detriment; that’s one of the problems with new youth, even of the beany kind.

There is a lesson here - if I may be so didactic, and having been so thus far, I will - one which I could have followed better myself, had I in my earlier life been even slightly more aware of the benefits of the metaphorically speaking bamboo framework that had been prepared for the beanstalk I was; on the other hand, however, there is something to be said for the weeds, the heady benefit of that lower perspective, that sense of implacability you take with you when at last you unbend and strive upward-- it makes you tougher, makes you more patient, renders you less needful of hope and more in possession of grit. So go low, beans, go low if you must, but don’t stay there too far into Spring; and above all, do not abide the weedy path...

To add weight to my inner words I disassembled the whole bamboo framework, expelled the weeds and from the overpoles suspended lengths of rough gardening twine about a foot apart, hanging down helpfully among all the suddenly weedless beanstalks looking around like new graduates of Legume U.

The world awaits you all, my beans; tomorrow is yours!

PRIMAL DIMNESS

At around dawn this morning, just as I was stirring back into to consciousness, in the quiet primal dimness of world and mind I heard some monkeys chatting upmountain in their screechy language about the state of the world and at once thought nightmarily of my just-burgeoning tomatoes and my new bean plants out there just beginning to stand on their own so as to produce my beans, and that it has been raining pretty hard for the past day or two, so the simians must be hungry and restive after being hunched up in drippy clammy treetops for so long with nothing but screeches for entertainment, and might just for the spite of it go around pulling up the new bean plants and biting the tiny green tomatoes of creatures fortunate enough to live dryly and well-fed in houses, so I decided the best thing I could do was go back to sleep and think about it later. There are times when you've just got to pull your foot up.