Weights and Measures

In the South, when we share the products of our garden with someone,unless we are talking about huge gardens and sharing huge amounts, the term of measurement that we use is "mess". A mess of anything is about as much as one might cook for a family of four people for one meal, though it means more if you're talking about a bigger family. A mess of beans for us, for example, looks like what is in the colander on the floor in the picture here. Those beans on the floor around it are also called a mess, such as that which is made when the bag of frozen beans falls out of the freezer and breaks open on the floor. To include both of these uses of the word mess in one sentence, you could say, "Janet made a mess on the floor with a mess of beans." Mess used with "a whole mess of..." means a lot of something and applies both to things you can count and things you can't. As in, "Janet's mom put a whole mess of beans into a whole mess of bags, and one of those bags fell out onto the floor."