Patch Crawling With Vines

I had a vision.  The small plot between our property and the rail trail forms a small, twenty by forty-foot rectangle.  There are a few small trees, but mostly its weeds, clumps of tough grass, ringed by some modest maples and a bed of pussy willows.  I wanted to turn it into a vegetable patch, crawling with vines and gourds.  Primarily I wanted big pumpkins.  And in my mind's eye there were squash and eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes.  How hard would it be to plant some seeds and have a few at least grow?  Rather, in fact. 

 

I continue on with my minimalist, guerrilla planting.  Stick and move.  Drop the seed in.  Scoot down a foot and do it again.  The harvest-dream remains but now, well into summer, I’m beset with doubt.  Why isn’t there much of any evidence of anything that has been planted to date?  I look over and a tuft of grass near a fallen log.  I remember dropping in seed all around there a month ago.  Stepping over I pull back a few vines and gaze expectantly at the ground.  Nothing that resembles the beginnings of a pumpkin vine. 

How then, did wild pumpkins ever make it?  If I drop hundreds of seeds into this patch and cover them with dirt, and that isn’t sufficient, what is?   If I turned the whole patch over and weeded it and watered it and managed to keep the pests off, certainly something would grow.  But what about heirloom pumpkins that were here before Henry Hudson and indeed, before Native American cultivation?  Clearly this particular wild patch is not their preferred niche.  Perhaps there are other, more aggressive, better suited plants in here that reach the sun earlier, or maybe there are creatures great and small in these parts that quickly eat pumpkin shoots as they appear.

 

Back where I left my blue bike and my red helmet there is a pumpkin plant that looks rather healthy.  It has meandered along a few feet and looks like the kind of vine that might really produce something of substance.  And it is growing from the pot that I’d brought down and left here.  Presumably this soil without weeds and unobstructed light have done a great deal to improve this seeds chance at flowering.  Perhaps the pumpkins will just arrive late, when they are supposed to, in early October.  Maybe we’ll yet see orange.   I'll finish the rest of the bags of seed I have and wait.  

 

 

 

Monday 06/21/21