Keeping up with what was going on in the new greenhouse at
work was difficult last spring with 9 staff, an incomplete irrigation system and hundreds of small children, community members and volunteers cycling through. After rearranging greenhouse tables several times and lots of lost plant markers, nearly all the squash and pumpkins were mysteries. I was frustrated that I'd lost track of some heirloom seedlings: Lakota squash and giant pink banana squash specifically. The mystery squash plants sat in the greenhouse longer than they should have, until a motivated staff member cleared a weedy section of the garden near the road and planted all of them (thanks, Justin!). During the summer many of them thrived and we harvested great Cinderella, sugar and Howden pumpkins, lots of spaghetti squash and delicata. After the big harvest day, all the squash were piled up in our outdoor kitchen for distribution and admiring. Three unfamiliar squash were left abandoned back by the road, where I drove by them numerous times before stopping and lugging them to my car. While I never found the giant banana squash, I finally got what I believed to be Lakotas -- two of them. Strange-looking to harvesters that day, these were two of the abandoned, lonely squash. The last was an unidentifiable, smooth-skinned, oblong, orange 16-pound pumpkin-like squash.
What are you? I wondered.
