I learned something new from my eldest daughter, Anna, this year. Never a really dedicated gardener, I wasn’t ready to begin planting until late June. Beyond lettuce and radishes, I wondered, how could I plant slower-growing crops and hope to harvest before a killing frost?

One answer was obvious. Buy some things as plants. To get tomatoes ripe before the cold kills the plant, at least one source says you have to begin fussing with the seeds six to eight weeks before you’re ready to plant seedlings. Then, it’s another two or three months until there are ripe tomatoes for salad.

Much as I love tomatoes — and a day without tomatoes is something of a day without sunshine in my book — I don’t have the house space or the patience for that kind of gardening. If I can’t buy tomato plants, then, I won’t grow them.

Her other suggestion, chitting, was something I’d never heard of. The word, by the way, made its appearance in the early 17th Century, according to the Lexico website. Lexico is a collaboration between dictionary.com and the Oxford University Press. “Chit” apparently was a dialect word meaning “shoot” or “sprout,” and that’s what chitting is all about. While gardening websites usually talk about chitting potatoes, all sorts of seeds can be chitted to give a garden a leg up on the weather or to see if old seeds are still viable.

It’s a simple process, at least the way Anna had me do it. She soaks the seeds in warm water for a few hours, drains them, then rinses them, keeps them warm and moist for a few days and, viola! The seeds begin to root and are ready to plant. There are plenty of websites with better instructions than these, if you’re interested for next year.

Sometime in late June I decided to chit green bean seeds. They began to sprout in about a week, and on July 3 I planted them. They were starting to emerge within 48 hours (some of them had first leaves on them by the time they went into the garden) and now they’re getting ready to bloom.

I do expect to have green beans, plenty of them, well before the plants die.

Anna was in town last week, and it was, as usual, a treat to see her. Her sister turned 33 this week and she’ll be 35 in about a month. I look at them and, as I suppose most mothers do, I wonder where the last three decades have gone.

Full moons from now through October remind my of their infancies, of lying on the couch at night and feeding them. Those night feedings were tiring, to be sure, but also wonderful in their own way, each with a quiet infant as close to me as it was possible to get.

That period was followed by the Terrible Twos, which, with my girls, were never particularly terrible. Those first glints of independence were a joy to watch.

The independence grew with school. I can remember a string of first days in school or in a new school and the anxiety that went with them. I had a standard line, “I’ll stay with you all day if you want me to,” and I don’t recall staying as long as five minutes with either girl.

I learned something wise when Anna hit her teens and she and I began the long and occasionally unpleasant part of growing up and moving out.

A mom who also happened to be a school counselor told me to lay off, to pick my battles with my daughter carefully. It was good advice: Purple hair and a ring in her nose were not particularly important in the greater scheme of things, at least sometimes.

Watching Anna and her friends at that age, though, reminded me what an unhappy time teenage years can be. For one thing, some girls can be incredibly catty, and that’s the period where one or more will publicly announce a party to which one girl is publicly not invited.

Today, Anna’s as happy as I’ve ever seen her, and that’s pretty wonderful. It’s what I wanted all the time she was growing up, and it’s well worth waiting for.

If I haven’t seen such major changes in Mary, meanwhile, I suppose that’s because I’ve never been away from her for long. They’ve been there, I know, but because we live together they haven’t been as obvious. Still, like Anna she’s a great person and I’m proud to call her one of my best friends.

— Janet Stevens is deputy editor of The Bulletin. Contact: 541-617-7821, jstevens@bendbulletin.com