Accidental Pumpkin Patch

It’s hard to tell how many pumpkin plants are growing in the tangle of thick vines and giant, prickly leaves at the west end of the vegetable garden. I didn’t plant any of them. At least not directly. The vines, just tendrils at the start, really – delicate and green – sprang from the compost pile after the potatoes and zucchini, eggplant and cucumbers, green beans and carrots had been planted. Those curling shoots, dainty as they were, stood in unruly contrast to the tidy rows of seeds and seedlings tucked into the spring garden.

At first I wasn’t sure what was growing from the fertile pile of discarded greens and kitchen scraps in varying degrees of decomposition. Could it be summer squash? Cucumbers? Certainly something in the Cucurbita family. As the leaves grew wide, and huge, orange flowers unfurled, it became clear these were pumpkin vines, no longer delicate, but thick as my thumb and growing fatter by the day.

From a multitude of flowers emerged a single pumpkin. A baby: no bigger than a gumball, streaky green, and clinging serenely to a swelling vine.

I struggled through recent memory to figure how a pumpkin ended up growing from our garden compost heap. I remembered the deer – our Winter Deer, we called her – who frequented that heap from first snow late last fall until the drifts got too deep to traverse from forest to garden. It was the discarded Jack-O-Lantern, chucked into the compost, that initially attracted the Winter Deer; we first spotted her near dusk as she nosed through the wire fence at the frozen, orange shards. Soon she was visiting several times a day, leaping into and out of the garden, and ruining the fence in the process.

But the inadvertently planted pumpkin seeds would have arrived earlier in the fall, before the ground had frozen, when we carved farm-bought pumpkins and tossed their slimy, many-seeded innards atop the compost pile.

Comprising the discarded bits of many fruits and veggies, the compost heap often sprouts haphazardly with volunteer plants during the summer. I am always amazed these seeds can lie dormant through the frigid winter and soggy spring and still germinate come warmer weather. I regularly pull unplanned potato plants, stringy tomato seedlings, and opportunistic onion greens from that corner of the garden where we throw the scraps. But something inspired me to leave the pumpkin vines be.

At first it was mere curiosity, a desire to discover what was growing there. When the tiny pumpkin appeared, I figured we’d watch it for a while to see if it would survive – and whether other tiny green orbs would swell from the vines.

Our lonely pumpkin has grown steadily through the summer and is now beach ball-sized and almost completely orange. Its size and near-perfect shape seem fitting for a midnight transformation into Cinderella’s carriage, if only we had a fairy godmother in the neighborhood.

For weeks it seemed that was the only pumpkin we’d have. The vines stretched beyond the deer-wrecked garden fence into the yard, across the blueberry bushes in the garden, over the first row of potatoes (which I was thus inspired to dig early), and on toward the beans. Scores of flowers opened, and I peered through the lush leaves at each new bloom, looking for that little bump that would mean another pumpkin. (I do, after all, have three children; one pumpkin is not going to cut it.)

Alas, the pumpkin remained alone, one giant squash amid all those leaves and blooms. Until last weekend, when I noticed one more small, green, baby pumpkin on a section of the vine twisting through the fence and onto the lawn. Then I saw another, and another. I counted a dozen new pumpkins: late bloomers in this early September heat wave, but there nonetheless.

It seems unlikely they’ll all grow large and ripen before the air turns frosty and everything remaining in the garden withers to brown. Despite this week’s heat, after years of New England life experience I know the temperature may plunge any day now. But the new pumpkins are growing fast. Some of them are already nearly the size of tennis balls.

Perhaps our accidental pumpkin patch, sprung from last year’s Halloween remains, will yield this fall’s Jack-o-lanterns.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the September 11, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Turning the soil

For days now, I’ve been scanning the ground when I’m outside, watching the slowly growing shoots of green for signs of that first spring bloom. This is a ritual I’ve kept since childhood, when I would jump off the school bus each spring afternoon and scamper down the driveway to my mother’s flower garden, peering into the neat tangle of perennials just starting to brighten from winter brown to green. There was a small cluster of crocuses planted there, in Easter shades of purple and yellow and white. When the first one finally burst through and opened its dainty cup to the strengthening sun, I knew spring had arrived.

Some people, with drier, warmer garden beds than mine, have already spotted their first blooms this spring. Alas, while the snow has melted from our perennial garden, I think the one crocus we had has drowned. It seems I’ll be waiting awhile still for the first sunny burst of yellow daffodils, which will fade away to deep purple flag irises, feathery pink astilbe, and buttery gold Stella D’Oro daylilies.

While I wait for the flowers, I have turned my attention to the vegetable gardens, tending to the compost heap, which was neglected all winter, and tilling last fall’s layer of leaves into the dark, wet dirt. The big garden out back of the house is still too soggy to work much. But the two smaller beds in the side yard are well-drained and ready for planting. Into one of these this week we sowed our first crop of peas, dropping the small, dried spheres into the warming soil.

My children happily paused from their sandbox play to help set the wire fencing that will serve as pea trellis, then place a handful of seeds into neat rows. We all love the feeling of digging fingers into yielding earth, and we can nearly taste the sweet peas that will grow on the vines that sprout from those seeds, climbing slowly upward, then swelling with pods that we’ll break open for the sun-warmed treasure inside.

We’ve planted cherry tomato plants and cucumbers into pots inside, leaving them in the sunny shelter of the big window to soak in the warmth. The children check on these pots each day to see how the seedlings within have progressed. But this is not the same as digging in garden dirt, tilling the soil by hand, etching straight rows to take the seeds, carefully patting the earth above them.

So we have planted the first seeds of hope for a garden this year. And as the snow has receded, we have rediscovered some of our warmer weather activities – bike rides down the lane and walks through the woods road to the brook, where the children toss sticks for the dogs to chase. In our early spring ramblings, we have encountered all sorts of lichen and fungi, puff balls that smoke spores when touched, squirrel middens under tall hemlock trees, and a place on the big boulder out back where some animal scraped away thick moss in search, we think, of a meal.

Still, we are waiting for that first bloom. It might come with the daffodils, which creep higher each sunny day. But sometimes we find the first spring flowers in the wild – bloodroot peeking from beneath the crooked old apple tree by the clothesline, or marsh marigolds growing in bright patches along the brook, or trilliums and trout lilies pushing through leaf litter along the roadside. While we wait, we’ll keep turning the soil, preparing for the long, hot, growing days of summer.

And in the fall, after the vegetables have been harvested and the perennials cut back for winter, after I’ve turned the soil for the last time this year, I’ll try to remember to plant some crocus bulbs in the patch of garden by the living room’s big window, where the sun hits early and stays all day. That way, next year, we won’t have to look so hard or wait so long for the first bloom of spring.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears in the April 25, 2014 edition of the Record-Littleton.