The Year of the Bean Pod

Remember back here when I was telling how great it was that the apple harvest was so huge and wonderful this year?





Well...one thing I forgot was that if the fruit harvest is great for one variety, it is usually great for others...namely, the Locust tree in our front yard that IS NOT, I repeat, IS NOT beanless.

Look at this beautiful tree:

Now look at my front sidewalk:

To dispose of these beans, in past years, we have tried:

• mowing up the beans (actually, I have tried that as I am the mower in our family)...stuff flies out everywhere at amazing velocity, and it is really dirty.


• sucking up the beans with the leaf blower/sucker...it chews up the blade so quickly that it takes longer to keep replacing the blade and emptying the bag than it would to rake the damn things.


• leaving them where they lay...except for the vinegar-y stink from when the beans get wet (which the inevitably do) and the bulldozer it takes to move them at the end of the season when we need to park in that part of the driveway...this is a pretty good option.

So, our most recent solution is to rake all of the beans to the sidewalk in front of our house and fill the "yard waste" dumpster each week full with beans. This morning the trash men will pick up the third dumpster-full of the season. By the looks of things, they have many, many more weeks to go.

If ANY of you have a better solution, I would kiss your feet, buy you dinner and drinks, and even make your Holiday greeting cards for you!