Counterintuitive gardening can make a lot of sense

Counterintuitive means something is contrary to our own intuition or common sense but is still true. So, it is counterintuitive that closing certain roads can actually improve the flow of traffic. It is counterintuitive that there is more to eat in a single 18-inch round pizza than in two 12-inch round pizzas.

Gardening can sometimes be counterintuitive. With fall and killing frosts quickly approaching, this is not the time to put out bean plants, because they won't have enough time to bloom and set beans before frost.

But it is time to plant beans if you really don’t care about how well they produce or if they even bloom. This is the time to plant beans as a cover crop to turn under later and fertilize the soil.

Cover crops of beans will improve water infiltration, reduce erosion and keep down weeds. Cover crops also reduce soil crusting. The biggest benefit of planting and digging under beans as a cover crop is improving soil structure by increasing its the organic matter. Soil structure is the way the individual pieces of clay, sand and silt are assembled.

Beans are legumes that create their own fertilizer by fixing nitrogen from the air into the soil. Before planting beans or any legumes, you might want to treat the seeds with rhizobia bacteria. This bacteria occurs naturally in the soil, but dusting the beans with the powder or granular inoculant will increase the amount of nitrogen released into the soil when you till the beans under. Never soak beans before planting or inoculating them.

I used dry beans from the grocery store. Dried beans, especially those sold for sprouting, will grow well in the garden. Not all beans from the grocery store will grow, but most will, and the investment is just a dollar or two. Only dry beans will germinate, so choose whatever is inexpensive and available, such as navy beans, pinto beans or kidney beans.

Beans do not transplant well; they might not survive transplanting and grow quickly, so there is no advantage to starting them indoors. Sow the beans directly in the garden, 1 inch deep about 4 inches apart. Plant them thickly wherever there is open space and they will not crowd existing plants. After the beans germinate, give them about 1 inch of water a week. Keep the top 6 inches of soil moist but not soggy.

They will quickly sprout and bloom in about two months. You can either leave the plants in the ground to die with the first frosts and till them in next spring or till them under this fall. Either way, you will have added organic matter from the stems, leaves and roots, and lots of nitrogen from the nitrogen-fixing root nodules.

Other counterintuitive things to remember – a typical cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds, and the game was named “Chinese” to cash in on the craze for Eastern culture, but Chinese checkers was invented in Germany.

To be truly counterintuitive, plant beans that you never plan to harvest.