First fruits

The other day I ate a squash.  It was a yellow squash.  I sliced it, put it in a cake pan with some olive oil, onions, and tomatoes.  I baked it for a half hour or so.  It was pretty good.  At the same time, it was amazing.

It was the first thing I have eaten that I actually produced.  A few months ago I cleared a small patch of ground behind my garage.  I pulled out the weeds, broke up the ground, and mixed in some good soil.  It was a patch of ground about seven feet long and three feet wide.  In that small patch of ground we planted some carrots, cucumbers and squash. 

It didn’t go exactly as we hoped.  For one, I had no idea how many seeds to plant in each hole.  Secondly, a few weeks later when things started to grow I couldn’t tell which little green things were the plants I wanted, and which ones were weeds.  So I let them all grow.  A month later we had one squash plant and a seven by three foot patch of six foot weeds.

Yet we had some squash.  Two yellow, beautiful squash.  We picked them.  I cooked them.  We ate them.  It was the first time I ever ate something that I grew from the ground.  It felt good.  It felt useful, like for the first time in my life I was a producer and not just a consumer.

Maybe next year I’ll figure out which ones were the weeds, and we’ll have some carrotts and cucumbers too.