Kirsten Vangsness

Garden Growing Pains Garden Growing Pains

Now that it's harvest season, I'm curious.

How did your garden grow this summer?

Wasn't it thrilling in those early days to watch your vegetable patch begin to come alive?

To step into your garden in the dewy dawn and see what magic had transpired during the night.

How each brave green shoot had grown a little taller.

And then, after only a few weeks, to spot adorable tomatoes and green peppers no bigger than you might find in a dollhouse kitchen.

to peek under a fuzzy leaf and encounter a shy cucumber the size of a pea, to gasp at the appearance of bugle-shaped squash blossoms, the cheerful orange of school buses, where there were no blossoms, none, the day before.

But then, something happened.

The cucumbers grew bigger slowly and steadily, but when they finished growing, many were only the size and shape of golf balls.

You rushed to the garden each morning to see if the golf balls had elongated at all, had taken on anything that resembled a cucumber shape.

No, still golf balls.

Others of your cucumbers started out shaped like tiny crescent moons and stayed that way.

At full maturity, they resembled cashews.

Was there some warning on the plastic label that came with the seedlings, which you stupidly threw out, that you missed?

Some mentioned mini cucumbers?

Ditto the squash.

The squash vines grew as thick as hot dogs.

The squash leaves as broad as butterplates.

And yet the squash, a pallid yellow, grew no bigger than a light bulb.