Indoor Gardening

It all started at the grocery store, as most stories do.  It was early October and I was browsing through the produce section when I came upon the squash bin.  Unlike most grocery stores, in which I only ever notice butternut squash, spaghetti squash, and acorn squash, this one held varieties I had never seen before.  Enthusiastically, I dug through and found, to my delight, one that looked quite familiar.

Last year, thanks to the generosity of our neighbor, Ben and I feasted all winter on squat little green Japanese pumpkins known as kabocha, and we loved the sweet, almost melon-y flavor of them.  Sitting before me, in the squash bin, appeared to be one of these beauties.  I scooped it into my cart without a second thought.  At home, after examining it more carefully (a.k.a. reading the sticker), I found that it was a buttercup squash, a cousin to kabocha.  We found that it had a pleasant taste, not as sweet or as moist of the kabocha's, but definitely worth going back for more.  By that time, however, the only squash left at the store was old and mooshy and smelled its age.

Then, I had a brilliant idea, remembering my eighth grade science class, in which we spent weeks experimenting with radish seeds.  Again and again, we got them to sprout, just be placing them on damp paper towels.  Lacking the patience to wait till the temperatures outside were rising, rather than falling, I folded a paper towel into the bottom of a plastic container, and drizzled it with warm water to make a bed for the buttercup seeds.  There they sat, unchanged for weeks, until finally - a sprout!  They grew quickly, from then on, rising to push the plastic wrap covering out of their way, until we went out of town for a couple days.  We let the house get cold, and I accidentally left the precious seeds on the cold, cold windowsill.  When we came back, our would-be squash plants were withered and dry.

I guess they were probably doomed from the start, since we had no pot nor soil in which to house them.  Still, it was a sad moment.  But I haven't given up!  Here's my latest crop: