Growing a plant from scratch is an exercise in patience. This is certainly a good lesson for kids to learn, but to be honest, there are a lot of adults that would benefit from being handed some seeds, myself included.

I chose a runner bean to create the covering for the play tents because it grows relatively quickly. It is often described as "vigorous" because it can reach maturity in just a couple of months. Maturity means the average timespan from when the plant is actively growing to the expected time of harvest.

Despite being a fast climber, some of us might still perceive the vine's week-by-week progress as slow. But this gives us an opportunity to practice patience. We can't speed it along. It's a natural process that is outside of our control. This can be both freeing and frustrating, so I'll leave you with this quote:

"Patience is not the ability to wait, but how you act while you're waiting." - Joyce Meyer