Despite having the maiden name of Gardner, my thumbs are not green.

People look at the flower gardens in my front yard and believe I know what I’m doing. They push my comment of “oh, I’m a lazy gardener” to the side as modesty. In reality, it is the truth.

My flowers are perennials. I plant, water, and then watch what survives. If the flower makes it, I plant more of the same. Eventually, it looks like a plan. Weed a little, spray a little deer repellent, trim back here and there, and the garden is done. If there is a dead spot, I plop in a pot of annuals. While admittedly beautiful, the final product is simply proof of resilience despite negligence.

When it comes to vegetables, I am an abject failure. This is no surprise. With the impractical, I have mild success. With anything practical, I’m hopeless. I know a group of foxes is a skulk, but I can’t wash windows without streaks. I can fix grammatically incorrect sentences, but I’m hopeless at home repairs. I can grow a garden full of flowers, but all my veggies wilt and die. Out of six tomato plants, I managed two tomatoes, one of which was eaten by a chipmunk.

So, our veggies have come from a CSA, farm stands, family and friends this summer. I gratefully accept them all, even the beans. That green beans are a favorite is somewhat of a mystery because when I was a child, they were the bane of my existence.

My parents had a large garden, half of which was planted with rows of bush beans. Picking was the first torture. Wet leaves spread disease, so my sister and I had to wait until the dew dried. That meant it was hot… Hudson Valley hot. And the beans were green … just like the stems and leaves. Those that were missed would grow large and unappetizing. To top it off with the ultimate quirk of nature, the more we picked the more beans the plant produced. Ugh.

What happened to the buckets of beans? The tips and tails were endlessly snipped. Extras were then cut up, blanched, and frozen. All year, we ate them and ate them.

Green beans would appear everywhere: Slipped into a soup, raw for snacks, boiled with butter. There was no avoiding the beans. Surprisingly, we never had the traditional casserole with mushroom soup and french-fried onions. My mother didn’t like cream sauces. She created her own casserole — think traditional ziti but with hamburger and green beans instead of noodles.

It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t a dish to look forward to. As a college student, my brother would gladly take the ingredients back with him. After all, it was a free meal. But even he admits that once graduated, he never made it again.

My mother still defends her culinary offering and claims that others have requested the recipe. I have no reason to doubt her, but to my knowledge, even she hasn’t made it in a very long time. When I was a teenager, however, it frequently appeared at covered dish dinners, one of which was my high school sports banquet.

At these ceremonies, teams would sit together while parents mingled with one another. Long tables would be filled with all the families’ offerings, and each team would be called up to fill their plates. After eating the teams would be called up, the seasons summarized, and the awards handed out. You always hoped that your team would be one of the first to be called, so the pickings would be good.

As the girls’ varsity soccer team took their place in line, I was directly behind our biggest bully. All season, no matter what I did, in her eyes it was wrong, and more than once a ball had been kicked directly at my head. If she wanted to butt ahead of me in line, I wasn’t going to argue.

We navigated the veggie trays and the salads just fine. Dinner rolls and butter, no problem. Then came the entrees.

“Yes, ziti!” my teammate exclaimed in pure joy.

I froze. I recognized that serving dish.

She scooped a huge serving onto her plate, then …

“Yuck! Who would make something like this and bring it here?” Her eyes narrowed as she scowled around the room.

Wide-eyed I shook my head in feigned ignorance. “Ew, I don’t know.”

“Hold my place while I throw this out,” she ordered.

Who was I to argue?

Instead, I was grateful that the neat little label with my mother’s name was on the bottom of the dish, not on the serving spoon. And that the family recipe could remain a family secret.