A certain party in my household has declared this “The Year of the Dry Bean.” And we’re not talking just a few of these and a few of those. We’re talking (actually he’s talking) about raising the tender plants en masse.

The goal – as last I heard it – is to raise a variety and volume of beans to concoct a good bean soup. Soldier beans, Jacob’s cattle beans, French flageolet and the pretty pink-speckled horticultural beans. And perhaps a few extra heirloom varieties to add color and flavor to the mix.

To make it worth our while, of course, we must expand the limits of the garden to accommodate a large crop of the foodstuffs. While I’m not opposed to this endeavor, I’m not fully engrossed in it either. Mind you, I’m engulfed in my own quest to accomplish “The Year of the Sweet Pea.”

I dare say that of all the seeds from which our garden plants spring forth, the bean is the most prized in my mind. I like to hold them in my hands, allowing them to flow in a beautiful stream, one by one from palm to palm, guarding each bean like a greedy miser hoarding his stash.

Bush beans, pole beans, dried shell beans: All are a pleasure to grow. There’s just something splendid about placing a bean seed in the ground. Perhaps it’s their sheer size that eases the gardener’s mind. Not tender and meek-looking like the lettuce seed. Lacking the fine and delicate nature of a tomato seed. No, the gardener places the robust bean seed in the soil with assurance: Its plump, rounded edges face the elements with bold defiance, and build in the gardener a quiet confidence that all will emerge well, regardless of the environmental odds, perhaps regardless of the gardener’s care.

Of course, as with all staple garden crops, generations of gardeners have grown beans, passing on with care the knowledge they amassed during a lifetime of production.

“Don’t go in through the beans,” my mother or grandmother would call to my sister and me when we went out to play on a summer’s morning when a heavy dew coated the land. We knew from a very young age that trespassing through the garden on a damp morning, particularly through the leafy crop of beans, was a foremost faux pas, an unforgivable, reckless, heedless act that might result in deadly disaster for the beans.

“Your leg just touched those leaves,” I’d say with horror to my sister, as she passed by the beans on her way to pluck an early-morning cucumber from the vine. She’d look back at me with sad “I’ve-brought-doom-down-upon-us-all” eyes. Perhaps in our young minds we’d overexaggerated the gravity of the act, but it was one of those lessons that our mother had impressed upon us, and her mother and grandfather upon her.

Don’t go through the beans on a dew-covered morning. A lesson, as it turns out, bound in scientific reason. Beans tend to be susceptible to a whole host of fungal organisms – powdery mildew, white mold, gray mold. Disease is spread among plants when fungal spores are blown or splashed from parts of an infected plant to those of an uninfected plant. A chief mechanism of spore transport is through water droplets. And so, wading through knee-high leaves on a sunny summer morning is likely to spread any lurking spores from one plant to the next.

Brushing past the plants would probably do no serious harm, but being now a mother myself, I clearly see the value in impregnating small minds with just a bit of added gravity in this particular life lesson – something that likens the act of wading through the bean patch on a damp morning with that which is just a tad short of certain doom.

And so, I watch my children march around the bed of beans, giving it wide berth as though it were a bed of venomous snakes. Their arms outstretched across the other’s abdomen, making sure there’s no accidental brush of the bean leaves, they shimmy sideways up the nearest path, breathing a sigh of relief when they achieve clearance. Pleased with themselves, they look back and regard the crop with horror of what might have happened, and with a sense that their act was crucial in protecting the welfare of our precious crop.

Perhaps it doesn’t assure certain ruin if one passes through the bean crop on a dewy morning, but it is a basic and sound practice if one wishes to minimize disease. It’s one of those age-old cultural practices we each should heed, both because it may save our plants from disease and because it may minimize our reliance on combating established disease with pesticides.

So as my dear husband formulates his plans for “The Year of the Dry Bean,” I’ve been certain to remind him several times that he must be sure never to work in this patch on those early dewy mornings. The naughty, smirking little gardener inside me chuckles. While he waits for the sun to rise high in the sky, drying those leaves of their dew, I foresee myself out there at 5 a.m., tending those sweet peas in dry and damp weather alike. Cultivating those colorful blooms with hoe and trowel. Glancing over at the forbidden ground around the beans. Knowing, full well, that “The Year of the Sweet Pea” will reign.

Diana George Chapin is the NEWS garden columnist. Send horticulture questions to Gardening Questions, 512 North Ridge Road, Montville 04941 or e-mail dianagc@midcoast.com. Selected questions will be answered in future columns. Include name, address and telephone number.