Cheating the season.

It’s been the hottest summer I can remember.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash—one by one the plants went down. Except for the peppers, by early August our summer garden had succumbed to the heat. 

It’s mid-September now.  Mornings are almost cool.  It’s time to put in the winter garden.  But as a gardener, I have two traits in common with gamblers, I hope against reason, and I believe in luck, so a couple of weeks ago I spread my hand of seed packets on the table and pulled out the summer squash varieties that had the shortest time from germination to harvest, those promising squash in 5O days or less.

To keep the young plants out of the heat, I started the seeds indoors in Dixie cups.  But as of today they are all in the ground and on their own.  They’ll have to contend with late summer grasshoppers whose agenda is to eat voraciously and reproduce before dying.  They will have to endure the hot afternoon sun and then, at the other end of their 50 day journey, produce fruit as night time temperatures fall. 

Good thing for the gardener that nature, the original gambler, bets heavily on hope and luck too.