Lately, we’ve been eating pretty significantly from our garden. Last night, I did grilled zucchini along with freshly sliced tomatoes and cucumbers for our side dishes. Two nights ago, it was the same grilled zucchini along with green beans, also picked fresh from the garden. And four nights ago? You guessed it, grilled zucchini, this time with freshly dug potatoes. I told my husband last night that “we’re finally down to just four zucchini in the ‘fridge.”
While the zucchini does tend to produce and produce and produce, we’ve also had other bounty like banana peppers and jalapenos. Onions, garlic, beets, radishes, lettuce, spinach and those wonderful little sun gold tomatoes have also graced our table this summer. From mid-August through September, that will be the norm. We grow a lot of food and can genuinely feed ourselves from our garden. Of course, we do buy the other staples, particularly the protein source and my favorite, bread. But what you see is what you eat when it comes to our garden.
We’ll also soon be swimming in tomatoes which means it will be time to freeze them to be canned later into marinara sauce. The black beans are growing like weeds and are heavy with bean pods. And the sweet potatoes have done what they normally do, which is grow all over the place.
But nestled in the back corner of our garden is a little gem that is all mine: a pumpkin. My husband begrudgingly started four pumpkin plants this spring with the idea that two would survive. Only one did. The odds of one plant actually producing a viable fruit are genuinely not that great. But this little baby did. I’ve got one – currently small to mid-sized pumpkin growing in the garden and it’s still got plenty of time to plump up.
Now, the roots of my husband’s lack of enthusiasm for growing pumpkins are twofold. First, they take up a lot of space in the garden for not very much edible yield. Secondly, he grew me two plants before and I got three pumpkins which I barely used for decorating. Thus, he wasn’t inclined to grow me something that I really wasn’t going to use.
But, as some may have figured out, I can be relentless and I really wanted a pumpkin. He’s also a pretty nice guy and tends to give into me if it’s really important to me. So, he gave in and I got my plant. Now, I’m thrilled.
The growing of one mid-sized pumpkin doesn’t seem like much in a garden where we have over 200 onion plants, 50 tomato plants, four rows of regular potatoes, 36 garlic bulbs and rows of beets, peppers and cucumbers. But it’s significant to me.
One of the reasons I love our garden so much is to eat from it, obviously. Another reason why I love it is that you derive satisfaction from making something grow out of almost nothing to providing you with so much. But the third – and to me equally important – reason I love the garden is for how it represents the seasons of WNY.
At first, when you’re planting seeds and keeping them under grow lights for hours on end while it snows outside, starting a garden is a sign that spring is coming. As hopeless as it seems, winter is almost over. Then, when everything is planted but so small and fragile, it’s a sign of late spring and early summer, where there are entire months of promise laid out in front of you. By mid-August, that promise becomes reality in terms of harvesting and eating out of the garden. Eventually, the shorter days tend to catch up with even the heartiest things in the garden and they begin to die off, signaling the time to dig things up, pick the beans at full peak and have one last Super Bowl of harvesting.
That’s where my little pumpkin comes in. It signals fall and my favorite season of the year. It signals the start of the whole holiday season which runs for me from Labor Day through New Year’s. It signals the tradition of carving pumpkins and making pumpkin pies. To me, it’s home, family, tradition and just a squishy warm feeling all around.
And it’s just sitting there waiting for me to celebrate it. My husband doesn’t know but I go out and visit it every day. I want to see how big it’s gotten and make sure it isn’t starting to turn orange yet. It’s like my not-so-accurate calendar. While it’s still growing and green, it’s summer and a time to just celebrate being laid back and enjoying beautiful weather. When it starts to turn, it may be time for a pair of jeans and a sweater. By the time it’s ready to pick, it will definitely be time for a jacket and it will be the most fabulous time of the year for me.
But for now, it grows quietly. My husband went out last night and treated it with a mixture of baking soda, oil and dish soap to get the mildew off of the leaves and help it stay healthy. That warmed my heart. I know he doesn’t care much for the plant but he obviously sees me excited over it and wants it to grow as well as it can for me.
And it will, honey. It will grow just fine. And along with it, the season will turn and we will move from spring to summer to fall just as we always do. And while I may never pull a Linus from Charlie Brown and wait out in my tiny little pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin, I am already pretty sure that my little pumpkin is the Great One.
The Yuppie Homesteader 