Opinion | The Parable of the Squirrel-Planted Pumpkins
Pecans had been a money crop for my grandparents, who supplemented their unreliable farm revenue in any manner they may. My grandfather drove the college bus. My grandmother taught math. Not like peanuts, the farm’s main crop, pecans required no planting and nearly no care, they usually paid out yearly as long as somebody picked them up earlier than the squirrels received there first. That’s the place my siblings and cousins and I got here in.
I used to be astonishingly outdated earlier than I discovered that pumpkins are meals. It could by no means have occurred to my grandmother to place a pumpkin pie on her Thanksgiving desk. Within the Decrease Alabama of my youth, fall celebrations meant pecan pie topped with vanilla ice cream. Pumpkins had been for jack-o’-lanterns.
That each one modified due to the squirrels in South Carolina. The primary yr I used to be in graduate college there, a vine with massive, squash-like leaves popped up in my raised beds. I used to be new sufficient to gardening to suppose it could be some number of watermelon, so I let it keep. The vine produced nice yellow flowers, which intoxicated the bees, and in due time the flowers shriveled and fell off, revealing a bumper crop of spherical inexperienced fruits. Sugar infants!
Alas, no. They had been no sort of watermelon, a lot much less the treasured sugar child. They had been small, dense, pie pumpkins, apparently planted by the neighborhood squirrels. One Saturday I despatched a complete pie dwelling with each member of my writers’ group and nonetheless had sufficient pies left over for my neighbors.
Quick ahead to 2021, when pumpkins of all sizes and varieties began showing on Nashville porch railings, piling up beside entrance doorways, cascading down brick steps. It regarded as if a drunk big had been staggering round suburbia all evening, vomiting pumpkins.
This, I discovered, is what occurs when ornamental developments from the cozy-sweater area of the nation attain the sleeveless-blouse area of the nation. Behold the autumnal porchscapes of New England, shaded by Tennessee timber nonetheless inexperienced with summer time!
Porch décor is just not an enormous precedence at this home — now that our kids are grown, my husband and I don’t even get round to carving a jack-o’-lantern most years — so I didn’t give the porchscapes a variety of thought till vacation decorations started to switch them. On rubbish day the curbside bins had been out of the blue overflowing with pumpkins, and I hated to see all that meals going to waste.
I’ve reached the age of caring not a whit whether or not individuals suppose I’ve misplaced my thoughts. I liberated as lots of these garbage-can pumpkins as I may carry and set them within the scraggly space behind our lot. Aside from planting native timber and shrubs, it’s by no means a good suggestion to feed wild animals, however I made an exception for the porchscape pumpkins. In a hungry time, a variety of creatures love a pumpkin — not simply squirrels and chipmunks but additionally raccoons and opossums and skunks, foxes and coyotes, even turtles and a good variety of birds.
Which is why, when the porchscape pumpkins reappeared final yr, I discussed in our neighborhood WhatsApp thread that our wild neighbors would recognize the leftovers as soon as pumpkin season was over. I assumed I used to be gently suggesting that every household may save their discarded pumpkins for their very own other-than-human neighbors to get pleasure from.
Then pumpkins began arriving each day on the bench beside our Little Free Library as my candy neighbors delivered donations to the wildlife sanctuary that’s our half-acre lot. I moved the pumpkins to the yard as shortly as I may. If I dawdled, squirrels would climb proper up on the bench and dig in.
By December, pumpkin vines had been arising everywhere in the yard — within the little meadow on the aspect of our home, within the deep shade out again, within the flower mattress surrounding the Little Free Library itself. All fall, the squirrels had been hiding pumpkin seeds, storing up for winter.
However winter was elusive final yr, because it appears destined to be yearly on this human-warmed world, and the heat had stretched out lengthy sufficient for these seeds to germinate. As a substitute of storing pumpkin seeds, the squirrels had been planting them.
Winter did come finally, and the younger pumpkin vines died with the primary frost. I assumed that was the top of them. I used to be mistaken.
Come Could, extra pumpkin vines popped up within the flower mattress, and this time summer time was on their aspect. The vines grew and grew and unfold and unfold, spilling down our driveway the way in which their dad and mom had as soon as spilled down my neighbors’ entrance steps. Pumpkin vines curled across the mailbox and climbed the bench. When pumpkins emerged, a few of them ripened proper on the road. Neighborhood youngsters began paying every day visits, checking on their progress. I started to rethink the story of Jack and his beanstalk. Would an enormous be coming within the evening?
“The pumpkin has a boo-boo,” a neighborhood 3-year-old instructed me sooner or later. After I bent to see what she meant, I noticed the place a small set of highly effective incisors had carried out a style check, simply barely scratching the floor of the rind. Lengthy earlier than I might have guessed it was time to select a pumpkin, the squirrels who planted them within the first place had come again to assert their crop. One of many pumpkins started to look precisely just like the undead model of a jack-o’-lantern.
The pumpkin vines, regardless of being colonized by powdery mildew, are nonetheless blooming, and child inexperienced pumpkins are nonetheless showing the place the blooms fall off. However already new pumpkin vines are erupting up everywhere in the yard. A squirrel-perpetuating ecosystem.
For a complete yr, I’ve taken nice pleasure from watching squirrels return the neighborhood porchscape pumpkins to their authentic function, within the course of feeding their very own neighbors on this scruffy habitat. I like to consider the squirrel-planted pumpkins in my flower mattress for example writ small of how the pure world as soon as labored earlier than we interrupted it with our poisons and our machines. The way it can nonetheless work, even in our constructed landscapes, if solely we might let it. And very similar to my grandparents’ pecan timber, this harvest requires no work of us, and nearly no care.
I acknowledge the forces arrayed in opposition to this hopeful view of the scorching habitat we name dwelling. Who doesn’t know them by now? They weigh on me with the drive of an enormous’s foot urgent me into the new floor.
Hope wells up anyway. God assist me, I take a look at the squirrel-ravaged pumpkins subsequent to our Little Free Library, and my entire coronary heart brims with hope.
