Beans in Your Ears

My Mama told me not to.  But being a kid even after all these years, I will anyway.  Forget all the Things I get to do today, I'm making something with beans--to put in your ears.

It all started with my gardening buddies.  Nearly a year ago we spent an excited morning over a fine tea  sharing our seed catalogs, seed lists and dreams of produce in abundance.  Two of us wanted to plant beans--the sort that would be dried and cooked into a pot chilly or stew--to feed a hungry family. We ordered a packet of several different varieties, the ones with fun names and wonderful colors and favorite flavors.  After the seeds arrived, it was tea again, this time to divide up the seeds and stoke our already-flaming enthusiasm for our gardens-to-come.

Total bean harvest

I grew about a dozen plants of four bean types.  No math skill is required to figure out that the total yield from all of them put together will be less than a hungry-person serving of beans.  I was not much impressed by the numbers, but I was nearly blown off the beanstalk by their handsome good looks.   That's when "not to put beans" started ringing in my ears.

Ready to 

I've just been to the bead shop to get a few supplies and advice--no problem that I've never done this before in my life. Drill a little hole in the bean, thread it on the wire, clip it together and, Voila! C'est fini!

Poor little bean in the big bench vice

It turns out that big fingers and tiny, very hard beans and large, wobbly drills are an unlikely combination not well suited for each other.  No problem.  That's what  a bench vice is for.

Fava beans with little pale beans

And wouldn't you know, in much longer than it takes to tell, there were two pairs of earrings made from legumes, a little silver and tiny garnet shards--gifts for my garden plarkmates--worth considerably more than a hill of beans.













Sometimes it's best not to listen to your mama.

Beans and garnet chips