Beans, beans.

IN my valley the frost date--the date after which you may expect no frosts at night--is Memorial Day. Now some tough kales and spinaches will survive all winter under the snow, and the traditional date for planting peas is St. Patrick's Day. But everything else gets planted in a happier time, when the green curtain has fallen again and the first wave of life has washed over the world. We planted our beans on an overcast day when the rain held off for the afternoon. We had ordered the seeds online. They were cheap enough--$1.25 to $1.75 per package--and planting them was simplicity itself. You poked a hole in the soil, dropped in a bean, covered it up, and moved on.

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I have had bad experience with bush beans. They come up as stubby little shrubs, coy and ungiving. But my pole beans have always gone nuts. So it was this spring. We planted three kinds: romanos, a wide flat green bean; purple trionfo violettos, a purple string bean; and speckled calicos, a large red and white lima bean in a light green pod. In six days, the plants had sprouted, and once they were free of the earth they began their upward flight. Our garden is fenced with hardware cloth stapled to cedar posts. Deer could clear the seven-foot height, but never do, because they don't like being enclosed. The posts do double duty as bean highways. Free marketeers are always saying, give men opportunity, and they will better themselves. Beans say, give us a post and we will head for the sun. They make a slim green spiral, tough as twine, but finer, and smooth. When they reach the top of a pole, they pause, as if puzzled. An exploratory frond reaches out, at an angle, seeking some purchase. Frustrated, it doubles back upon itself. Introspection? Self-abuse? The romanos formed a leafy mass at the top of the fence like a green cloud, hanging down for sheer weight. They tangled with the asparagus plants, they got into the compost bins. Their wall of the garden became the bower of beans.

In Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the lifelong tutor, also named Jean-Jacques, has Emile, his lifelong student, plant beans, in order to teach him the meaning of property. Allan Bloom used to tell Saul Bellow that Emile was a great novel; Bellow had to explain patiently that it's terrible. The beans were a good touch though. Even a youth as backward as Emile could make a go of a bean patch. When I was a youth I saw Mickey and the Beanstalk, Walt Disney's version of the fairy tale with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy subbing for Jack. It is decadent Disney, replacing menace with buffoonery. But the scene of the magical beanstalk shooting up overnight was only a heightened version of what real beanstalks do.

The weather this summer was erratic. There was a short, blistering drought, bracketed by periods of rain. The stream, which usually shrinks to a trickle, or a series of still, silent pools, ran all summer long. The bean plants were whipsawed; they did not seem to know what to make of it. Flowers appeared on the fronds, small and simple, white for the romanos, purple for the trionfos, but still no beans. Had they put all their energy into vines and leaves? I suppose it happens; you learn to expect anything from nature.

Then at the end of August the beans began to come. The purple beans arrived first. You could collect them by fistfuls. If you didn't lift up the leaves to look for hidden lurkers, you would come back in a week to find that they had grown eight inches long. Picking them was like shopping for dinner, except there were no check-out lines. Everything was on the honor system: earth's honor. Plant, and I'll feed you. The mass of romanos started off stingily, but then became if possible even more prolific. The lima beans haven't done so well, but perhaps they are still waiting to surprise me. Like other vegetables, bean plants can be determinate or indeterminate. The former produce all at once. The latter can produce repeatedly over time. If you don't harvest indeterminate beans, they will stop with one crop, believing that their work is done. But so long as you keep taking the beans away, new ones will keep forming.

Cooking them is easy. Boil water, steam. Or you can throw them into a soup, with everything else from the garden. Or if you need a snack while picking and pruning, eat a few raw. I respect beans that can survive transportation. All honor to the farmers of California and Chile who grow them for us, and to the shippers who bring them to our supermarkets. But beans from the front yard or (at the farthest) down the road are a different species.

Rousseau turned to beans for instruction, but Disney was wiser. They teach no moral. We impute aspiration to their thrust, but it is the simplest aspiration in the world: more. More of the same, more of me. A polemicist for family values could say that the bean pods show an interest in reproduction, and the next generation. But be careful of that argument, for it casts a greenish (or purplish) light on two-legged, sentient families. Do we have them to raise new individuals in love, or because we love ourselves? Beans just want to keep going forever. And who, bathed in early autumn sun, will blame them? Such a present would make a fine eternity.

Beans live until the first frost, generally the first full moon in October. After that bite, the leaves look stunned, whacked. Then it's time to start taking the garden down. Peeling the vines from the posts is patient work, like untying knots. You cut them off at the root, chop them with shears, and put them into the compost