Just when you thought it was safe

Lineage

Someone asked me a couple days ago if I was contemplating putting in a garden this spring. Thinking about it, I must admit, yet I’m in no rush, and if and when I do sow and plant, it’s not going to be much.

In fact, there are ‘plantings’ in the ground already, and I may not do any tilling at all. I might just rely on my existing mature compost piles and do some very intensive growing mounds. I cannot imagine better soil.

I already have buried a bunch of those potatoes that I photographed a couple weeks ago. Some onions and squash are in the same pile. And just so we have a point of reference, this is the pile under which one would find the remains of a female nutria, nine ducks and a guinea fowl.

I make this distinction for an adjacent pile contains the dead coyote. Regular readers will no doubt remember this pile that is in fact a piece of art. Yet, even this earthwork has squash sprouts emerging. Seeds from cross-bred hybrids of Delicata and Spaghetti winter squashes grown last year on this same mound were planted a month or so ago, and a number of sprouts are bursting forth, the eventual fruit from which we will call the “Beuys” winter squash.

In that I planted one decomposed Spaghetti squash and one over-ripe Delicata, I am not certain of how the hybridization will manifest itself in each of the fruit’s seeds. Presently, seeds from both types of squash have sprouted. I look forward to the seeing how the fruits mature, what their shape, color and markings will be, and if the seeds from the Delicata produce a different hybrid than the Spaghetti (one would think so). Once the plants grow into flowering, fruit-bearing plants, I will not attempt to halt any further hybridization to occur between the plants growing on the mound. Beuys is, after all, only a concept at this point, and as the fruit is as much a piece of art as it is a vegetable, it should be allowed to morph, influences being what they are in the history of art. Provenance over patent.

There will be much documentation in the coming months.

Note: For the initial building of the Beuys compost pile, see http://www.patrickcollier.com/I_Like_Art_but.html