Half the seeds, but still too many veggies

There's a popular magazine that interviews famous people and asks them to name three things that they have in their refrigerator. If I were famous and were asked that, my answer would be: cucumbers, zucchini, and green beans.

This sounds as if I am a vegetarian, which isn't necessarily so, but right now our refrigerator is storing the harvest of my husband's garden.

The cucumbers are still prolific and grow everywhere. Even though my husband planted half as many cucumber seeds as usual this year, they are still very wild and wander into the yellow dinner-plate dahlias and come out looking like banana squash.

Overnight, it seems, the cucumbers grow to the length of your arm, from finger tip to elbow, and at a quick glance we can't tell them from the zucchini. And sometimes they grow so large they curl around into J's or C's.

"What are we going to do with these?" my husband asks. "We've given away so many that people run the other way when they see me coming."

"I'll make gazpacho," I answer. "With the cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes, we can have a good cold soup."

But the most unusual crop we have this year is the green beans, or pole beans as some call them. A gardener friend suggested planting one bean with one corn seed. We liked this idea and tried it. We planted, we watered, and we wondered what would happen.

The bean plants are flourishing. However, the corn hasn't seen the light of day. But it doesn't really matter since our final crop of corn from last fall was so abundant we kept it in the freezer and are still enjoying it.

But back to the beans. The plants must have been taking lessons from the cucumbers. They intertwine with the zinnias and tomatoes, but that doesn't stop them from producing a bag full of beans every day.

I guess the lesson we're learning from all this is that a little is a lot. Half the seeds go a long way.