The Driveway Garden

Six ears was the whole crop and we saved two of them, which is a bad year by any measure. What is still standing out there is eight feet of dried corn stalk, and that is the part nobody raids. Cut them at the base once the leaves go papery, peel the ragged bottom off so they stand in a bucket or a stand without fighting you, and leave them somewhere dry and airy for a couple of weeks. In October they go either side of a doorway and cost nothing. A crop can fail and still be worth harvesting.

The order matters more than it sounds like it should. Go out with the bin first and you will pull an armful of vine with three good things hidden in it and never know. Go out with the basket first and the same hour gives you dinner and a cleared bed. So: one slow walk picking everything worth eating, put the basket somewhere out of the way, and only then start ripping. The cleanup does not get harder for waiting twenty minutes. The harvest does not survive going second.

A squash plant in September is a lid. The leaves are the size of dinner plates and they lie flat over everything the plant made in the last three weeks, so the honest way to clear one is on your knees with both hands in it, lifting leaves and looking under them, before you take a single stem off. I find more that way in five minutes than I found all week walking past it. Then pull the vine. What is left underneath is compost, not a harvest, and you only get one pass at telling those apart.

Every seed packet shows you a head the size of a football and it sets you up to wait too long. A cabbage that is small and tight is a cabbage; a cabbage that finally got big is usually one that split down the middle first, or one the slugs found while you were being patient. Squeeze it. If it gives, leave it. If it feels like a closed fist, cut it and stop negotiating with it. This one came out of a driveway bed and I would grow it again.

The reason I clear a bed in the first week of September is not tidiness, it is that an empty bed this early is still a growing season. Lettuce, bush beans, bok choy and Chinese cabbage all have a run in front of them from here, and they go in staggered rather than all at once so the bed keeps handing you something instead of everything on one Saturday. That is the whole trade for an afternoon of pulling vines: you are not putting the garden to bed, you are buying one more crop off the same ground.

No lesson in this one. You pick something up, you turn it around, you look at the underneath of it, and then you put it in the basket or you put it back. Ten seconds, forty times an afternoon, and it is most of what the hour actually consists of. Nobody films that part and it is the part I would miss.

A squash or bean vine at the end of the season has rooted in four places you cannot see and threaded itself through whatever is growing next to it. Yank it and you get the vine, a kale plant, and a hole where somebody's roots were. Two snips instead: one at the base, one wherever it has grabbed something, and then lift it out in pieces. It takes an extra minute and the bed next to it does not notice you were there. This is the whole difference between clearing a bed and wrecking two.