Parenthood vs Gardening

Friday, 18 Jul 08 (posted about 1 months ago) Sunny 36°C / 97°F

The joy of carrying my babbling baby boy to the garden each day is nothing short of magical.

Every day, I pick him up from daycare on the way home from work, and when we get home, the puppies (now dogs, but they’ll always be puppies in our hearts) leap about eagerly to get a whiff of us both, before darting out the back door to do what dogs do best.

“Da da dAAAH! Dah da da Hooooooooo,” Jack bounces excitedly up and down on my arm, his gaze darting from dogs to plants and back again.

I stop at each plant, giving it a careful inspection, telling the boy what I’m doing at each step of the way. Our first stop after the Spice Wall is the Not-Actually-A-Zucchini plant that turned out to be yet another beginning pumpkin patch. With a growing sense of dread I realize the few parts that aren’t yellow or brown are attached to dead or dying vines, and my pruning shears only underscore the fact that we’ve lost this one to the damnable blight known as the Squash Vine Borer.

It’s a harsh blow, harsher than I thought. Being a man, I’ll never know the experience of childbirth, or carrying a child to term, but there is what I’d imagine to be a similar type of connection to plants one has raised from seed. The sweat, the tears, the literal blood that was shed…the sunburn from getting so caught up in my gardening work one morning that when sunset kept me from working any further, I, Lobster, endured several days of pain, and several more of peeling. It’s as much a badge of parenthood, only a different sort. I did not have to push my crops through a tiny opening in my body (that would be highly illegal in our state anyway), but neither did my wife endure several months of labor. I would be a fool to propose being a gardener puts me on par with being a mother that gave birth to a child, but it does give me a bit more of an understanding of the special connection between mother and child.

And so, it was with a deep mixture of sadness and anger that I put the ailing pumpkin bush out of its misery, and laid it to rest in the compost box, next to its slightly more decayed brethren. Jack pulled himself up and gripped the edge of the compost box, coasting along the edge, and felt the need to say a few words.

“Daaa-hoo!”

Daa-hoo, indeed. The grim work of the reaper done, we continued our inspection of the garden, and the pruning of the dead leaves, occasionally cursing the squash-vine borer to the Nth generation.

The rest of the garden brought a bit more encouragement. The yellow squash had not only grown considerably since yesterday, but several other yellow squash had begun to fruit from their blooms, and the two tiny zukes had turned into two rather large tubes that are looking to be a very tasty meal in the near future. Bees buzzed happily among the mint, drugged out of their mind, and I felt compelled to snap a few photos of them. The bees were so stoned that I was able simply sit there, inches from them, and snap close-ups. They didn’t care in the least; had I been a bee, they’d probably have asked if I wanted a hit of the mint bloom.

My watermelon plants had begun attacking a lone yellow squash plant that dared grow within a few feet of it. I decided to break up the fight, gingerly snipping the thin little watermelon tendrils that were attempting to throttle the competition, and carefully moving it towards another direction when I noticed something amazing. It had actually started to bear fruit. There, on the vine, was a teeny, tiny little watermelon about the size of a shooter marble. These things were half-dead when I planted them, and I’d given up on them before I’d even started. Their transplanting consisted of taking them out of the pot, setting them on the ground, and taking whatever I had left of the compost and peat, mounding it around the thing, and covering it with grass clippings. Now it’s bearing fruit!!!

I guess where one life ends, another begins.

We finished off the day with an inspection of the pumpkin patch, and found two ripe 15 pounders ready for harvesting. When the wife got home, she snapped a photo of them, along with our 18 pounder, and then had the boy and I pose there with them. I like the photo. It’s a reminder of the duality between being a father, and being a gardener, and the work that both entail. Maybe someday little Jack will feel the same way.

Want to comment?

Mondomuse wrote:
Libra, what a throughly enjoyable and humorous read. Thanks for sharing your perspective on gardening and parenthood.

Posted on 18 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Om wrote:
I have been enjoying reading your journals. I hope you don’t mind the unsolicited tip on squash vine borers. I use a syringe full of water with BT (bacillus thur.) in it. I toss small bits of this in my rain water barrels to keep the mosquito larvae under control. It is safe to water your plants with it, and eat food grown from plants with this. It just interrupts their larval cycle (and kills them). I am also an organic gardener, and in addition to this and hand picking it keeps my plants pretty healthy. Also, check with your county extension agent for when the hatch cycles are to help you focus your attention when it is needed. Congratulations on both your gardening and fatherly achievements. You have a good crop growing on both fronts.

Posted on 19 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
The Libra wrote:
Thank you, my friends. It was as much fun to write as it was to experience. Hopefully my future journal entries measure up. I’m so addicted to this site, it’s not even funny.

Om, please, please, please, by all means, share your experience. That goes for you too, Mondomuse. I’m a greenhorn gardener and this is only my first year to really attempt food crops.

My main pumpkin patch is too large to water by hand these days, I had to give in to the lawn sprinkler (I know… really inefficient), but maybe what I could do is attach one of those hose-spray bottles with BT chunks in the bottle part. I could probably syringe the smaller plants, like the zukes and yellow squash. Do you just inject the syringe of stuff directly into the vine’s cavity, or halfway, so that it gets in the xylem and phloem? Or into the fruit itself?

Posted on 19 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Cmagnus wrote:
I have a similar (but much smaller) volunteer something patch. You give me hope that someday I’ll actually get some squash from it. So far I’ve gotten no fruit, but I’ve been heavily researching squash vine borers ever since I saw an adult flying around my patch.

Squash vine borers hang out in the hollow center of the vine which is why topically applied anything can’t harm them. The injection method is supposed to put the BT into the hollow center of the vine, so that they’ll eat it and die before they can kill your plant.

Other methods I’ve read about, but fortunately haven’t had to try:

Surgery: If you see the signs of a borer (check for holes with saw-dust type stuff near the bases of the vine), you can use a sterile knife or razor and slice open the vine until you get to the borer and manually pluck it out and kill it before the vine dies. Vines are supposed to re-root if encouraged to do so, so if you cover the damaged portion of the vine with compost or potting soil, it’s supposed to encourage the plant to root at the point of the damage. It sounds invasive, but given that the entire vine is otherwise shot, it doesn’t seem so bad if it gives you a chance of saving the vine.

Acupuncture: Go out after dark with a bunch of pins and a strong flashlight. Supposedly if you back-light the squash, you can actually see the borers inside the vine and impale them on pins. I’m not sure how many it takes to kill them, or if you’re supposed to leave the pins in for a while or pull them back out, but it seems less invasive than surgery. I imagine the task would be easier to convince someone else to hold the flashlight.

Posted on 19 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Mimosamargot wrote:
What a great journal and very impressive pumpkins – not to mention an obviously very intelligent boy, judging by his comment.

Posted on 19 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Armorel wrote:
I agree with Mondomuse, what an interesting and entertaining read :-)

My kids never showed a great deal of interest in gardening but it’s never too early to introduce a youngster to the wonders of sowing a seed and nurturing it through to maturity (and hopefully a good harvest!)

I haven’t got space for a pumpkin patch but I do have a couple of (round fruited) courgettes (zucchini) and three butternut squash (one of which is looking a bit yellow around the gills) so I hope I’ll get a few fruits in the fullness of the season.

I don’t know if we get squash vine borers here in the UK ….

Posted on 19 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Happibun wrote:
Fantastic stuff.

Posted on 19 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Om wrote:
You are ideally trying to get the BT into the center cavity. But just sort of try for the center and hit a couple of spots. I usually try to hit all the vines in a span of about three days, then come back in a week and do it again. That usually does it for the growing season, unless I happen to see them again. Then I just repeat. I have done the surgery thing too, but not had great success. I lost one huge yellow squash plant this way. I think the damage was just too much, between my clumsy hands and the beetles. But it is the usual method.

Posted on 20 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Nax wrote:
I put my garden in 20 years ago with the “help” of my babies. Those babies are newly harvested (22 and 19 years old) and transplanted to their own “gardens” (so to speak!). When they were little, up to maybe 10 or so, they would more or less gladly help me garden, and everyone enjoyed the home-grown meals all summer. Once they got into high school they didn’t want to help, gardening was mom’s thing, yada yada. Finally, in frustration I decided one year not to put in any vegetables and not to take such close care of the plot. Whoah. Those kids were so upset—why wasn’t there a vegetable garden! Where is the fresh raspberry jam! Are we going to have to eat tomato sauce from – gasp – jars all winter??!!

Ahem.

So keep that baby gardening. I have high hopes of turning those kids of mine into gardeners themselves in the long run. Turning the old song around, why would that want to stay in Paree, after they’ve gotten to eat the yummy stuff from the farm!

Posted on 20 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
The Libra wrote:
Wow! Thank you all for your kind words of encouragement. Little Jack has discovered that large pumpkins make great drums (and to my own delight, I find them far quieter that the pots and pans of his normal fare). I will absolutely keep Jack active in the garden and the yard, and convey to him the same message of my father, and his father before him: “a man who loves his land will take far greater care of it than one who is paid to do so.” Of course, the same applies to women, but I was repeating the quote verbatim, but more on that in a future journal. I just finished uploading the newest batch of photos, and need to separate my “Victory & Spicewall” garden into two separate, veg and spice.

Posted on 20 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Gaidig wrote:
Those alternatives to surgery look good. My roommate performed surgery yesterday. We had five borers.

Posted on 20 Jul 08 (about 1 months ago)
Linda Mae wrote:
Excellent viewpoint – in time we harvest and transplant our babies. My 25 year old is indeed harvested, transplanted and keen to be a gardener in her own right, the 22 year old a bit lees so but I live in hopes. I have by the way adopted Jack’s wise words for my own use. “Daaa-hoo!” feels like a good response on a whole variety of different gardening occasions.

Posted on 24 Jul 08 (about 28 days ago)