Growing Monster Hybrids (Gardening 101)

Scott & Helen Nearing

 I am on sabbatical this year, researching the rhetoric of a little-known Socialist  economics professor at Penn who worked in the first decade of the twentieth century.  He became better known when, having been fired from two academic posts for his research interests, he threw up his hands and staged his own intimate protest against the capitalist values of society.  He settled in Vermont and later in Maine, establishing with his wife Helen a self-sustaining farm and they wrote about it in a book called "Living the Good Life."  In this book, they write, "We maintain that a couple, of any age ... with a minimum of health, intelligence and capital, can adapt themselves to country living, learn its crafts, overcome its difficulties, and build up a life pattern rich in simple values and productive of personal and social good."


Inspiring. And yet, so far, we would certainly be dead were it not for our day jobs.  I'm no Scott Nearing (or Helen Nearing, for that matter).  And, certainly, a learning curve is to be expected.  I read about organic gardening and heirloom vegetables.  I even got political and read about Monsanto's project to patent genetically altered vegetable seeds.  Armed with this political and philosophical information about gardens,  I carefully saved seeds from my most successful plants two summers ago, which had been grown from heirloom seeds in a small garden.  Butternut squash, zucchini, and yellow squash in addition to tomatoes, several varieties of peppers, okra, and beans were preserved carefully and planted the following spring - last spring.

Tomato Bed, July 2011

Spring/Summer 2011 began strong, and I cleared nearly three times the space I had for gardening the previous year.  I planted all of the seeds I had saved the previous year, and when the first green stems poked their heads out of the freshly composted soil, I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment and having nurtured these little beings into existence.

At first.

Then, the tomato plants starting dying, one at a time, from "wilt," an appropriately named fungus in the soil that makes the plants melt.  My plants were sensitive to these diseases because of my duel decisions to use my own cultivars and to use a plot of land so recently re-cleared.  Even so, with seven tomato plants remaining, I felt confident that my garden would produce great bounty.

We didn't plant any early crops, so we were looking forward to June when the beans would be ready.  Then, the deer (or something) ate the beans.  Not just the beans, of course, but the entire plants. All of them.  But still, we looked forward to the delicious veggies that we expected to materialize.

And materialize, they did.  As they took shape, I realized that something was dreadfully wrong in the squash/gourd patch.  There were yellow zucchini that took on the shape of stretched watermelons.  There were butternut squash that were round.  My yellow squash was spotted and bumpy.  A few were completely baffling.  Something was amiss.

What do you get when you cross zucchini with acorn squash?

A quick Google search provided the answers.  Evidently, as many people probably know, squash and gourds can cross-pollinate with one another, creating brave new versions of common cultivars.  All it takes is a bee hoping from one plant to another.  Seems all my reading about the political and philosophical aspects of gardening was for naught, and my time may have better been spent reading a Burpee guide. We are anxiously awaiting spring to try again, and my garden journal is ready to go.  Is anything more fun on a 30 degree day than imagining digging in the dirt mid-summer?  I think not.