Beans are Nature’s way of fooling us into thinking anybody can be a gardener. Forget about finicky tomatoes that mold and rot and get attacked by bugs. Forget asparagus that takes three to five years to get started. Forget about artichokes that are slow to grow and when they finally mature, all you get is, well, artichokes. But beans are special.

Beans are magic. No doubt, that’s how we got the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. For those of you who were raised without proper fairytales, Jack is a boy whose mother sends him to town to sell the family cow because they are so poor. I don’t know what they could have bought with the proceeds that might have been better than a cow but it turns out nobody in the family is much of an economist.

Anyway, as Jack is walking along, he meets a man who convinces him to trade the cow for a handful of “magic” beans. When Jack’s mother hears this, she is understandably furious and tosses the beans out of window– whereupon they immediately sprout and grow up into the sky. Like beans do.

The rest of the story reads like a socialist fantasy with Jack climbing the beanstalk and stealing gold and a harp and a chicken from some giant who cries “Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum!” (to no effect), probably a commentary on corporate greed and the redistribution of wealth. But the moral of the story is that beans are magical.

There are over 400 different varieties of edible beans, including navy beans, pinto beans, rattlesnake beans, red rippers and my favorite, the multi-colored Good Mother Stallards. They are not only easy to grow, but beans are among the most nutritious vegetables. (Technically beans are classified as fruit, thus the term, “musical fruit”.) The tallest beanstalk ever recorded reached 46 feet, taller than three giraffes standing on each other’s heads. Reportedly, archeologists found some beans in an ancient Anasazi cave in the southwestern US, dated to 1,500 years ago. And when they planted the beans, they grew!

1,500 years ago, or 526 AD, was not a good year for gardening. A volcano, probably in Iceland, had erupted and blacked out the sky, resulting in global winter and famine. The Anasazi shivered, but they survived. Cool beans.

So, you can just imagine when it came time to decide what to plant in our garden this year, the choice was easy. Beans. Not that it requires much encouragement to get pole beans to climb, but we thought we’d give them a little inspiration. Using Menards’ cheapest furring strips, I built a multi-leveled scaffold that looks like one of those cat castles meant to enrich the experience of being a cat.

Our beans might not take the hint and climb into the sky like Jack’s magic beans. But at least we won’t have any angry corporate giants trampling around in our garden.