October frost means an end to spectacular garden plants

While yanking worn-out squash plants from their summer bed last weekend, I mourned.

These plants – the whole garden, really – had fed me and mine spectacularly for months, and here was the end of another harvest.

I already miss my zucchini stirfries, my broiled tomatoes, my cucumber sandwiches. I am close to missing my green peppers (I have one left as I write; its days are numbered). I have enough potatoes to keep me happy for a bit longer, and I am delaying eating my vegetable spaghetti because I just can’t stomach the thought of it being gone. I can’t even talk about my basil. (Actually, I can because I am trying to winter over one of my columnar basil plants, but I don’t know if it will survive, partly because I may strip it bare just so I can have that deliriously warm summer flavor this cold winter. I fear my will power will fail. I must be strong. I must.)

My biggest problem this fall has been that the weather was too kind, with the ides of October passing with no sign of a hard frost until this past weekend. I kept hoping for a miracle of rebirth, but as the sunlight shortened its daily rounds, I had to accept the diminished garden was ready to rest.

As I filled the wheelbarrow with the withered vines, I sighed over plants that had performed well, and especially over those that didn’t.

An e-mail earlier that week had prompted me to review this year’s plantings. David, a gardener from Cape Cod, had written to ask about my experience with asparagus pea, a curiosity I decided to try when I ordered my seeds last winter.

It was a bit of a surprise, especially since I had written about my intentions back in February and couldn’t imagine he’d held onto the article just to ask me in October. (Turns out David didn’t and had found my ode to the asparagus pea when he did a search on Google.com – it was the No. 2 choice, and while we here in the land of journalism don’t endorse any particular search engine, it came as a total surprise that someone somewhere could Google “asparagus pea” and my rantings would pop out at such a high level and that you could even Google my name and there I … but I digress.)

I had, indeed, planted a couple of short rows of asparagus pea, just to see what they might do. I couldn’t quite remember all of what I had written then, so I read the story again to see what I expected from the plant before responding to David’s e-mail.

Asparagus pea is that plant with the odd pods that look like a cylinder with four wings. There was also that confusion about whether it’s a pea or a bean, and whether its name is Tetragonolobus purpureus, Psophocarpus tetragonolobus or Lotus tetragonolobus. It also is a bit confusing when it comes to taste: The pod is like asparagus, the leaves like spinach, the flowers like mushrooms and the roots like potato.

Oh, yeah, I remembered. It was THAT plant.

So I wrote back:

“They sprouted beautifully but grew very slowly. We had regular rain, so I only watered a couple of times. The plants looked mostly like stunted peas, with smooth leaves like pea plants have.

“By late July they started to bloom, in a deep velvety red that a rose would kill to be. But nothing developed. Nothing.

“I kept looking every couple of days. Finally by late August, I saw four pods that were big enough to pick. I did and tossed them into a stirfry. The taste was unexceptional. I couldn’t tell you whether it was a pea or a bean that it reminded me of. Perhaps it was in some netherworld of its own.”

I went on to say that I hadn’t eaten any other part of the plant and couldn’t imagine how many plants you would need to grow to have enough to eat all the different parts.

And there was one particular thing that I couldn’t explain to David: “If all the flowers had developed into pods, I would have been inundated with them; they blossomed nonstop, so it is curious that I got as few pods as I did. I can only wonder if they have a strange pollination requirement.”

Maybe that’s why you end up eating all the other parts of the plant. You’d go hungry if you waited for the pods to form.

You think I should tell David?

Janine Pineo is a NEWS copy desk editor and systems editor. Her e-mail is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.