Today was the first time I’d been back to the garden since the smoke from the nearby Oregon fires started letting up. Instead of our normal late morning garden visit, Josie and I went to garden at 4 so we could also meet up with the reporter who’s writing a story about the SLUG Garden for The Beacon. It was pretty overcast, but it was still very nice to be able to breathe much cleaner air and to see blue in the sky compared to the yellow-grey haze that’s covered everything for the past week and a half.
While we were there, we gave everything a good watering even though it’s been pretty drizzly lately. The mildew had started to overtake the squash plants in earnest, so I cut back some of the dead and dying leaves. I’ve discovered that squash stems are covered in surprisingly sharp prickles and are delightfully crunchy and hollow. I’ll have to look into remedies to see if we can prevent the mildew from spreading more. We have three kinds of squash growing in the garden – a pumpkin, a yellow acorn squash, and a green acorn squash. The squash plants have produced a lot of fruit, which is really cool, except that they’re all very small. But it works out well from a food standpoint – one small roast squash per person is great for meals.
The blue pumpkin is the opposite – it only produced one fruit, but it was a very satisfying size. It’s too bad we don’t have a scale to figure out how much it actually weighs. Josie convinced me to take the one pumpkin home with us, so she had the honors of chopping it off the vine. Right now, it’s just sitting on our little coffee table, but I guess we’ll eventually cut it open and scoop out the seeds for roasting.
When the reporter arrived, we gave her a quick tour, listing off all of the trees in our orchard, and pointing out the sprawling grape bush and bursting tomato bed. There are so many tomatoes and not enough people taking them that they’re starting to ripen and burst on the vine. It’s such a shame that so much perfectly good produce is going to waste, but so many people don’t even know that the garden exists to begin with. Hopefully with this Beacon piece giving us some attention and our semi-regular posting on Instagram, we’ll be able to change that.
Before we left, we saw that one of the three pumpkin mounds we planted a couple weeks ago actually sprouted! I was really doubtful that we would see any of the pumpkins sprout since they were planted a little late in the season, and then with the fires, we weren’t able to go out and water them for quite a while. And when I looked closer at the beets, there were three new shoots growing as well! Nature’s resilience is truly so astonishing. Lately, with the constant deluge of terrible news stories, it’s been really hard to be optimistic. But seeing the new life in the garden push up into the world despite the lack of care it’s gotten is just like a big metaphor to have hope and keep going even when things get tough.
Next week I want to pay extra attention to our new sprouts – weeds have also started to pop up and need to go before they become established. I might spread some more compost from Physical Plant to encourage our new plants along. And if we have some more people stop by to help, I’ll put them to work amending the empty bed and planting lettuce and spinach. It’ll be an easy task if we have even two people show up. I’m so excited for all this new work in the garden to pay off!
