In early summer, I plant pumpkins and squash amongst the already sprouting garlic, so that once it’s scaped and ready to be pitchforked up to dry, the vines can stretch and take over.
It’s hard to keep squash vines contained, so I let them do whatever they want, within reason. What they wanted to do this summer was to grow across the garden gate, effectively locking me out, and that was a big no. Because of vine-boring bugs, I tend to plant only butternuts. Their stems are denser than other squashes and the borers fail to, well, bore.
A few years ago I counted 39 butternuts in my South Side Slopes garden, which is — if you don’t already know — too many squashes for a two-person family. Although I freeze some meals, one can get sick of soup and risotto and roasted squash in various veggie dishes, even if their vibrant interior boasts a glowing, heartwarming orange rarely found in garden vegetables. Even if their sweet-tasting flesh is a welcome contrast to the kale I’m also harvesting this time of year.
I have a reasonable number of butternuts this fall. Ten are growing along the fence line, across the walking onions and into the tomatoes. Once they’re settled in place, I wedge pieces of cardboard under them to keep their skin from rotting and just let them wait it out until around now.
There’s a kind of amnesia that comes with gardening. I forget if I always worry over the deer in October. Or is it early summer? I’m guessing it’s both. This year we’ve frequently caught deer hopping our fences and strolling through our yard, browsing the produce, checking out the view. We clap and make a scene and they look at us, purse their tiny deer lips, wave their fancy deer tails, and slowly, slowly saunter away down the alley.
Until two weeks ago they hadn’t decided to eat anything. Suddenly, overnight they denuded the center of all my bean stalks, sampled and rejected the popcorn and neatly clipped back my baby bok choy and kale. They didn’t touch the squash. People think urban gardeners don’t battle groundhogs and deer. They are wrong.
This year I’ve tried a new strategy: wrapping chicken wire at strategic deer-mouth-level areas. It worked for the tomatoes, and I was pretty sick of eating string beans by the time they got to them, to be honest. In the past I’ve used garlic-cayenne spray, Irish Spring soap, human hair, pinwheels, aluminum pie pans and other strategies that work for a time and then seem to amuse, but no longer deter, the deer.
I’m feeling clever about my chicken wire strategy as I run into my neighbor, Sue, a longtime Slopes resident, who cultivates a nice, productive vegetable garden three doors over from me. She asks about my garden, wonders if the deer have eaten everything.
“Not everything,” I say.
She responds with a shrug, waves her arm up to her vegetable-less slope and looks back to me. “It’s all gone. They got it all.”
Sue has a good attitude, though. After complaining about the deer, she reminds me that they’re hungry, too. We can just go buy groceries. With that she gets into her car, probably heading to the store for less-fresh produce.
I’m not as generous as Sue, but she has a point. Some days I need to remind myself that gardening is a hobby. I did walk up into my yard to check on things after she drove away. And sure enough, the deer had eaten nearly all the leaves off the squash vines, but they’d left me the actual squash. Total deal. I put a few pieces of chicken wire around the squash just to be sure.
As we plunge into fall, the squash’s ripening signals it’s time for comfort food — crisp air, crisp leaves and curvy squash that will get snipped from the vine and soon brighten bubbling pots, simmering like the summer sun.
Sherrie Flick: sflick@hotmail.com
First Published: October 12, 2021, 10:00 a.m.
