Pumpkins

This year’s garden has been a bit of a bust. Ok, worse than that. All the things I planted died because it didn’t get above 50 at night until well into June, and by the time it did, I was too busy with end of school/vacations/birthday festivities to replant. So we finally got around to putting some seeds in the ground in mid-July, which means we have some beautiful beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes that are only two months behind. I’m super bummed.

The nice thing, though, is that a fair amount of what I plant gives me a lot of wiggle room. For all my failures, our potatoes, onions, edamame, swiss chard, and carrots are doing beautifully. Kale and mint are the cockroaches of the gardening world, so I can’t kill them even if I tried (and I have tried…a lot.) Most of all, though our pumpkins put me to shame. Oh, those pumpkins. We don’t let them grow in the main garden because they have a habit of spreading all over everything and making weeding and harvesting nearly impossible. So they’re tucked away in the backyard, in a nice little bed that used to be a compost pile before the dogs came along. I say they’re tucked away, but what I mean is that we plant them all in that little bed and then they take over about half of the girls’ garden. That’s ok. By the end of the summer, the girls are bored of planting anyway so there’s room to spare.

But pumpkins are sneaky. They seem to take forever, doing not very much, and then, during the dog days of summer, when it’s too hot to do anything, let alone garden, they unfurl by leaps and bounds until you notice them one day and wonder if maybe they’re going to take over the house next. My daughter always chooses to water them because one of the nicer chores on offer, so I really don’t notice them until they’ve gone full Cinderella.

Even then, my pumpkins look like a giant carpet of broad, flat leaves. Not until I’m right up on them do I see the green squashes beneath. And then I realize, every year like clockwork, “Crap. We have like 20 pumpkins.” Even if you like cooking with pumpkin (which I do) that’s a lot of pumpkin to process. Even if you give away half to the kids to decorate with or leave out for neighbors, that’s a lot of pumpkin.

And usually, because we’re so conscientious and the weather isn’t a terrible rain-soaked monstrosity, the pumpkins start to come ripe in August. So, unless I’m unusually good at storing them (I’m not) they rot by the time we actually need pumpkins in October, so we end up buying more.

But this year, the year when everything failed and we just kept replanting and then we just gave up on some things, one by one, those pumpkins are still green in September. They’re just starting to think about turning. Right on track for a perfect October harvest, with pumpkin bread and pumpkin soup and jack o lanterns and, best of all, pumpkin seeds by the handful.

One of the things I love best about gardening is that no matter how many times I’ve screwed it up, the garden is always forgiving. Yeah, there’s no tomatoes this year. But usually, I’m scrambling to use those. And the few cucumbers we’ve gotten were from the girls, who got a couple plants from some teachers at school, so those appeared as if by magic to me. But even in a bad year, there’s never nothing. Often, the things that thrive most in the harder years are the plants that I never would have expected. They were just waiting for the right conditions all along.