During a particularly hot week late this summer, I suffered a brief lapse in the frequency of my squash-picking activities. This negligence permitted a couple of renegades to get carried away, responding to their neglect with a power surge (“Oh, yes! She missed us again, hiding under these huge leaves! Now we can really grow… Watch us and learn, you teensie little zucchinis over there.”) that left them super-sized and hard as drums. Not to put too fine a point on it, once I discovered them they were still lovely to look at but distinctly inedible. And once I realized just how large and hard they had become, I let them go wild. Just had to see how big they could really get. And they did not disappoint. I present, herewith, my pair of sasquatch squashkins:
For the month of October, they will make excellent stand-ins for the customary pumpkins, don’t you think? And the one in front, as if reading my mind, is turning more decisively orange with each passing day. Every time I see them, I feel oh-so-locavore and thrifty, not because I’m planning to eat them, but because I won’t have to buy pumpkins at the market this year. Oh, sure… carving is not in their future, but there’s nothing to stop me from painting jack ‘o’ lantern faces on them as we get closer to Halloween.
In a couple of frenzied hours over the weekend, I pulled all the dead annuals out of our patio pots and replaced them with those traditional harbingers of fall, chrysanthemums. It went faster because I had a little helper:
She supervised from her post at the front door. I never could have done it without her.
Comments welcome