As many of my millions of readers will know, I live in anticipation of the next wonderful and often surprising moment.

They may not necessarily have global significance, except in so far as in that moment there could also be a meaningful message that might help someone on this still-beautiful, little planet get through their day and find hope for the future. And that is no small thing, after all.

And so, I offer this moment in my garden, leading possibly to yet more wonderful and surprising moments:

It began ordinarily enough: In early July I decided it was time to spread the compost pile that began during and after last years garden season as I worked the garden and to a large extent lived off the produce through the winter. The strawberry patch had finished producing, so I spread what appeared to be well-done compost in between the rows. About a week later I was amazed when I saw that hundreds of Squash plants had ‘volunteered’ to germinate.

“Look at us,” I imagine them now crying out to me at the time, “we survived. We didn’t want to go off into the compost realm of being, however interesting it might be. We wanted to live again, as Squash.”

Now, you may wonder at the state of mind that considers such fancies. But in my dotage I have learned to let it “all hang out” finally, to have a little imaginative fun, when there’s no harm done. Call it freedom.

At any event, I let the volunteers grow, but was again amazed to see even more emerge, pushing their way through the crowd until it was obvious they would all soon make a canopy over the overwhelmed strawberry plants. So, I made a choice, first to thin the squash crowd, then transplant the best to a row of their own where I had planned a couple of new rows of strawberries as the runners from the existing rows spread that way. I reasoned that by the time the squash produced a late crop in September, assuming no early frost, that the ground would still be available for strawberries after the squash was harvested.

The other part of that reasoning was complicated by the fact I didn’t really know what to expect, regarding the type of squash the volunteers were likely to be. I had grown a couple of types of squash the previous season, including one I called my “weird” squash because it was derived from seeds I had saved from the 2020 season when I planted two varieties too close together and got a surprise hybrid that turned out to be remarkably colorful, and tasty, but hard to cut open.

So, “to make a long story short” as I say way too often, it remains to be seen what the volunteers will be. So far as I can tell from the fruit just starting to form, it looks like a butternut/acorn combination ‘winter’ squash.

Time will tell.

I find it very interesting to experiment in the garden like that, following an intuition not to get too carried away. There’s more than enough of that going on. Yes, of course, a good deal of selection has taken place over the thousands of years human beings have domesticated and naturally developed plants for consumption. But genetically engineering plants seems to me to be treading where we don’t belong. For example, vast quantities of corn, sweet corn included, have been bio-engineered with bacillus thuringiensis, a natural organism present in soil. In concentrated form it has been used, myself included, for years as an organic pesticide, harmless to humans, to control corn borer and corn earworms. They were not indigenous to North America, but once introduced accidentally years ago, there was always a big risk of a spoiled crop. But now, one of the problems with GMO-BT corn is – because “nature abhors a vacuum” – the sweet corn pests are already becoming immune to BT.

Speaking of squash again, squash bugs are a pest that often attack Squash Plants. I am very reluctant to use even organic, insecticidal soap to control them, mainly because I often see bumblebees and other pollinators feeding on the pollen of those beautiful, bright orange squash plants. So far this year, there doesn’t appear to be a serious squash bug problem in the several plantings of butternut squash and among the ‘volunteers.’

So, all things considered, I am looking forward to a wonderful squash harvest this fall.