Ma Walton and the Squash Monster

I have a problem.  I admit it.  I have always wanted to be Ma Walton.  Ever since I religiously watched the show years ago, I have been trying to recreate a facsimile of it in my own life.  Since my mom’s idea of dinner was getting dressed up every evening and heading for the country club, it’s been no small task for me to figure this all out.

 

The first thing I knew I needed to do was get a big old table in my kitchen and fill it up with a bunch of kids.  Fast forward a few years and 4 kids later…..  Check!  The next thing on the list to becoming Ma Walton looked like gardening.  After all, didn’t Ma and Grandma Walton sit on the porch and shell peas or beans or something? 

I started with a small veggie patch when the kids were young and every year it got bigger.  I was reasonably successful at it and even started making big batches of pasta sauce with wine from my tomatoes to freeze for the winter.  Yup, Ma Walton was starting to feel very familiar! 

 Fast forward 30 years, many gardens and mountains of vegetables later. To be perfectly honest, I have to admit that this time of the year, I start to wonder if there is something wrong with me.  My kids are all grown and on their own.  I could be lying in a hammock looking out at the lake instead of pulling weeds and hauling home buckets of produce that sit on my counter and look accusingly at me!

This spring a young man who lives in a little cottage near my garden wandered over.  I was staring at my still slightly frozen soil and planning how to get a truck load of composted cow manure transported and dug in.  He wondered if he could have a small portion of the garden in exchange for giving me some help.  I said a silent “THANK YOU” to the universe and handed him a shovel. 

Two days later he had the cow manure hauled and installed.  I wanted to shout “ALLELUIA!” Instead I controlled myself and reveled in the great conversations we were having, sprinkled with all those words that manic gardeners love such as “sustainable living”  “grow food, not lawns” and of course the big O as in ORGANIC! 

I had a new raw recruit to mentor!  Life was good and I was going to teach him how to live off the bounty of the land!  I pictured him remembering me years down the road when he had his own sustainable organic farm, complete with a hand hewn log home and some free range chickens.

  

I gave him his own little space in my garden, and we companionably planted seeds together in the warm spring air, as I babbled instructions on cool weather crops and how to replace them with something else in his space as the summer progressed.  I pictured us weeding, watering and harvesting together.

For the first week or two, I hand watered the seeds every day.  I figured since he was at work, I could sprinkle his patch.  The little seedlings started to grow and so did the weeds.   I started to wonder where he was as I thinned out my lettuce and carefully weeded around my young plants.  Occasionally I would see him in the evening bending over his little patch looking puzzled.  Other times he was out on the end of the pier fishing.  It was getting really difficult to run into him.  The first time I kind of sarcastically mentioned that he needed to actually water and weed his stuff to make it grow, he mumbled that he had been “watching to see what I was doing in order to learn something.”

Time passed and his weeds grew along with his radishes and lettuce.  I mentioned that perhaps he should start pulling some of lettuce to make room for tomato plants.  He said, “I don’t really like tomatoes.  They give me gas.”  I suggested alternatives, such as peppers, cucumbers and beans.  All of this was met with a blank look.

At this point I started stealing his radishes.  I mean who lets perfectly good veggies go to waste?  I caught brief glimpses of him as he was “heading up north to camp with his buddies.”  He often had large parties of friends over for barbecues and swimming while his ragged little patch was pretty much becoming an eyesore.

One of his duties was supposed to be turning over the mulch pile.  I regularly dumped my veggie scraps there, and it was not a job that I looked forward to.  I kept hoping that he would step up to the plate, grab the pitchfork that was so handily stuck in it and give it a few hefty turns. 

Eventually, I noticed some vines sprouting from the center of it.  I mentioned it to him on one of his sprints past the garden as he was heading for his motorcycle.   He said he hadn’t thrown any seeds of any kind into it.  I explained again how it needed to be turned over so that things wouldn’t grow in it.  He nodded and smiled as he roared off on his bike with his girlfriend perched on the back, who was looking decidedly unfriendly at me. 

I sighed and promised myself that I would find someone to turn the compost pile over tomorrow.   

Then we had a week of heat and rain.  The plants in the middle of the compost pile got really large, really fast with little ovals hanging all over them.   The pitchfork was buried under a huge tangle of vines that was starting to look like a squash monster. After another week I realized that it was my favorite kind and that there were going to be A LOT of them!  I vaguely remembered throwing a moldy Delicata on the pile in early spring. 

All of this has convinced me to look at the bright side.  I managed to finagle someone to work a truckload of cow manure into my garden, and I also have an unexpected bumper crop of delicious squash to harvest!

In the meantime, I keep telling myself to downsize my garden. But part of me is already mentally making a list of what needs to be done in the garden this fall and next spring and who I can con into doing it.  BTW….does anyone need a few zucchini?