Older Not Old — Gardening and Composting

We’ve been in our house for 18+ years and it did­n’t take long for us to build a gar­den. I’ve nev­er had much of a green thumb and I always thought of gar­den­ing as an activ­i­ty for retirees. But there we were, par­ents in our 40s with two 10-year-old boys, carv­ing a 12x24 foot gar­den out of a patch of lawn at the back of our prop­er­ty. We call it Fort Knox because it is rimmed with a high fence that keeps Bam­bi and fam­i­ly away and buried mesh to keep out Thumper, Flower, and Alvin.

The first year was the best — too soon for the bugs to know that the next meal was in our yard. Lots of years lat­er, we’ve had good and bad, along with plen­ty of gar­den pests who told their friends that we gar­den chem­i­cal-free. But this year stands out like no oth­er as the year of the vol­un­teer. Let me explain.…

Once the kids left the house, we decid­ed that we had the time and moti­va­tion to com­post. We start­ed duti­ful­ly throw­ing all of our fruit and veg­etable scraps in our black cousin-of-R2D2 com­post bin.

Imme­di­ate­ly we noticed a dif­fer­ence — a mere half-bag of trash remained on most weeks. And after TWO years, we final­ly had enough com­post to spread in the gar­den. We were under the mis­con­cep­tion that com­post gets hot enough to kill any seeds that might decide to grow. Wrong, it turns out.

In addi­tion to the beans, greens, and pep­pers we plant­ed, a whole mess of squash fam­i­ly vol­un­teers took hold from the com­post we spread around the gar­den. I pulled out some of them but oth­ers looked so hap­py that I moved them to strate­gic spots and let them do their thing. Tru­ly sur­vival of the fittest, the vol­un­teers are best­ing what we plant­ed in terms of resis­tance to bugs and abil­i­ty to live through a very hot, dry sum­mer. The crown jew­el is what we think is a Lunch Lady gourd. I picked the first 10-pounder, not know­ing that it could get to 20 pounds and need­ed to dry on the vine. Curi­ous to see what it looked like inside, I cut it open and tast­ed it. Deli­cious! So into the oven it went for roast­ing.

Would­n’t you know that the plant would set anoth­er one and we’re let­ting it get to 20 pounds this time. I see lots of squash soup and muffins in our future!

Here’s a pic­ture of anoth­er vol­un­teer, an acorn squash. We’ll har­vest it next week. From what I can tell, we also are grow­ing but­ter­nut squash, round zuc­chi­ni, and water­mel­on, all of which vol­un­teers.

For a split sec­ond, we decid­ed that we should throw away all the fruit and veg­etable seeds rather than putting them in the com­post bin. But this sur­prise har­vest is so much fun that I think we’ll keep doing what we’re doing!