I am an accidental gardener. If anything I plant grows to maturity, and by some fluke of nature becomes edible, it is sheer accident.
If we had to survive on what I grow, we would both be very, very thin. Spaghetti thin. We are not spaghetti thin; we are more like rotini.
Several years ago, I dreamed of growing potatoes. I threw some potatoes in a shoebox, threw the shoebox in a cabinet in the garage and the spuds sprouted wildly. I chopped up those taters, buried them in the ground and forgot about them.
That year we feasted on baked, mashed, sliced and diced potatoes from late summer through Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and into spring. It was a starch marathon.
Last year, I was deliberate about the potatoes, reading, researching, spacing and hilling, tending their every carbohydrate need. They grew to the size of marbles. Not even the chipmunks wanted them.
This spring I ventured into mini-pumpkin territory. Once again, I read, researched, dug and planted according to specs in a diligently-ended vegetable bed. Mission accomplished, I threw a few leftover seeds into a perennial bed that thrives on neglect. I figured the seeds wouldn’t sprout and even if they did 40-pound rabbits would bound out of hiding, devour them, belch to wake the dead and lumber back into hiding.
I tended the carefully-planted pumpkin seeds in the vegetable bed with great devotion and high hopes. I watched and watered and weeded day after day. Days turned into weeks. Nothing.
The seeds in the perennial bed were long forgotten. I may have hit them with the hose a time or two, and if I did it was purely accidental.
Back in the well-tended bed, on what seemed like day No. 479, a single bloom appeared.
That same day, I happened to walk by the dried and cracked perennial bed and was shocked. A pumpkin vine measuring 30 feet was rolling through black-eyed Susans, twisting around phlox, and cutting straight through a patch of veronica. What’s more, a secondary vine split off, branched north and was heading for the neighbors.
Back in the carefully tended garden bed, the single bloom had collapsed, no doubt doomed by the suffocation of excessive attention.
As for the vine thriving on lack of attention, I peeked beneath the enormous leaves and counted 40 blooms.
We may be harvesting crate loads of miniature pumpkins by the time you read this. We may be selling them in the driveway.
Once again, the accidental gardener has achieved victory. It may have been by chance, but it is still one more in the win column. I’ll take ‘em however I can grow ‘em.