Settling Down with the Sisters

'Settling' isn't compromise, it's self awareness.

As my garden and I grow older, more mature, we’ve settled down together.

To me this is a vital part of aging, a realization that every pretty bean or tomato or pepper or whatever may be eye-catching, but it isn’t for me.

It takes time to arrive here. You do need to flirt with all sorts of squash, or attractive pole beans or super hot chiles before you find exactly what it is that makes you happy.

You learn your tastes, what growing habits or tolerances you require – or cannot handle – and settle on a suite of bounty that suits you, and where you live. This necessarily demands your attention, your time, your effort. You must observe carefully what varieties flourish in your little patch of earth, and if they don’t, why.

And if you haven’t picked it up yet — this essay isn’t just about gardening.

Over the years, I’ve been surprised at how consistently true gardening-as-metaphor has been, at least for me. Time after time, the happenings of my garden have revealed larger truths about the rest of my life. And I don’t think I’m unique in this.

Think about it: Maybe the tomato your heart is set on simply doesn’t like where you live. You may love it, but it is an unrequited love. You dote over its every whim, and it deigns to give you maybe one fruit, maybe three. Or it just dies.

Meanwhile, several rows down is a tomato you tossed into the ground in a whim, a seed introduced to you by a friend — maybe it’s a random volunteer from somewhere else in the yard. Unlike the tomato you’re crushing on, this one grows strong, and offers you baskets of fruit.

You would be wise to pay attention to this tomato. It has found you as much as you have found it, and if you give it some affection, you will be repaid many times over. And if its fruit is sweet, you have found yourself a tomato you can settle down with.

(Incidentally, Holly isn’t the tomato. I’m just making a point here.)

So is it with the Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash.

Corn and squash are notoriously promiscuous. They will breed and cross with any nearby relatives, resulting in odd hybrids that are, usually, disappointing at the table. Beans are less so, but the same species (most common garden beans are Phaseolus vulgaris) will definitely cross if you’re not careful.

So as you play the field with these crops, sowing seed and reaping your harvest year after year, you must constantly import seeds from elsewhere, lest you inadvertently grow some odd thing like a butternut-zucchini cross or a hybrid cranberry-black bean that contains the merits of neither.

To be sure, you can embrace this chaos with gusto, because this is where real madness lies… as well as botanical genius. Maybe, just maybe, your cranberry-black bean hybrid results in a black bean with crimson swirls, or a white bean with both black and red markings. You’ve created something.

Something unstable, pretty yes, but a bit genetically crazy. It takes years and discipline to tame it, to isolate this gorgeous mad bean and make it truly yours — and even then you might still fail.

I lack such patience.

Instead of playing roulette and trying to “fix” the result of my foolishness, each year I’ve slowly grown X bean or Y squash, one at a time, until I’ve found a match that loves where I live, and which I enjoy.

In my case, it’s a yellow tepary bean, a butternut squash from the Pima Indians of Arizona, and, in a bit of genetic roulette, equal parts Hopi blue and turquoise corn.

I chose these for several reasons. All grow well here in NorCal, for one. Second, all store well. Beans and field corn are obviously best when dried, and butternut squash is one of the longest-keeping squashes; I’ve had them stay in good shape on my hearth for almost a year.

Third, and most importantly, I like cooking with them. The blue corn results in a pleasing gray-blue masa or grits, the tepary beans are oddly meaty and pretty on the plate, and, well, you should know what butternut squash tastes like.

None are varieties I can buy at a supermarket or in farmers’ markets; the Pima butternut is a huge variety you don’t see in markets.

Now that I am wedded to these three sisters, a new phase of our relationship begins. As I save seed year after year, selecting for the largest, most verdant kernels of corn, the heaviest squash, the largest, darkest beans – all from the healthiest plants – I change these plants, subtly at first, then, as the years pass, more substantially.

In time, we grow together, ideally suited to this place, resistant to the ravages of disease and bugs, strong and most importantly, delicious.

It’s already begun with the tepary beans. They began their lives as Sacaton brown tepary beans from Native Seeds Search, but over the past five years I’ve selected for the reddest beans from pods that do not spontaneously pop. Tepary beans, Phaseolus acutifolius, are only barely domesticated, and many will, when perfectly ripe, burst from their pods the way wild beans do.

Now about a third of the beans I grow every year turn out this way: redder and from more supple pods. Each year that percentage increases, and someday, they’ll all be this way. It’ll no longer be a Sacaton brown tepary bean, it’ll be a Sacramento orange tepary bean.

There is something deeply rewarding about settling down with a bean, or any vegetable or fruit – or yes, a mate – and, through patience, discipline and love, making a life together. The relationship becomes part of the fabric of your life, and, in the case of your seeds, something you can pass on when it’s your time to rest in the earth.