In early spring, I get antsy about growing things. For the past few years, while working and typing articles at my Lights Out office in Ruckersville, I have been starting seeds in small Jiffy pots. I put them in the bathroom window with lots of afternoon sun. Later, I transplant them to my garden in the back yard, sometimes with success, sometimes not.
This past spring, I started some yellow crookneck squash. I wanted 4 plants for my garden, and I sowed the seeds in 4 starter cups. They sprouted and were ready to transplant, when I thinned each cup to just one sprout. There was one cup with two young squash plants, both about the same size. I eenie-meenied them and pulled one up, but I felt so sorry for it, I stuck it in another cup of soil, gave it a little water and put it back on the window sill. Uprooted as it was, I didn’t think it would make it, but it did.
It flourished, but I didn’t have any more space in my garden – squash vines can get a little bulky. I couldn’t bear to kill the plant, so I went out behind Lights Out looking for some place to plant the persistent little squash plant. There was only one place in the middle of some grass with a little dirt showing. It was among a pile of dislodged cinder blocks. So I dug as best I could, put the little plant in a bit of mud, sprinkled some fertilizer around it, gave it some water and wished it Godspeed.
It has been the single most productive squash plant I have ever had.
While my garden squash plants have now stopped producing (I pulled them up yesterday) my lonely squash bush stands tall, proud and green. Not a yellow leaf on the vine. This morning I picked another perfectly shaped squash from the vine and I’ll likely pick three more in another two days, and it’s still blooming.
The moral of this story is that you don’t have to have a big fancy garden to grow things. Find a bit of dirt somewhere, plant something and watch it grow. I may get as much as 4 to 5 pounds of squash from that one lonely vine. And you can too, if you just plant something.