The Local Pizza Joint

This spring after we had had a nice meal of Spaghetti squash I took some seeds and planted them in an egg carton. There was some growth but frankly it was pretty pathetic. I thought that perhaps the squash was genetically modified so that the seeds would not produce a plant. I have heard that Monsanto does things like that but I don’t know it for a fact. Eventually the plants started to grow and I transplanted them to an empty section of the garden and ever so slowly the two plants began to grow.

 

The growing season in Calgary begins towards the end of May and ends in mid September, a total of about 115 frost free days. From what I read about Spaghetti squash the plants need about 100 warm sunny days for the fruit to attain full maturity which would take us into mid October. I didn’t have much hope, but on the plus side the vines had lovely yellow flowers and I can but squash at the supermarket any day of the week.

 

Well, on the news tonight the weather guy was predicting the first snowfall of the year and a heavy frost to go with it. Yes, fuck off Brian and all of your Vancouver Island sun worshipping, lotus eaters…snow! I cut the two squash off of the plant and brought them into the house. One of them (the big one) might actually be edible and the dwarf one might be good for making a mini jack-o-lantern. They both might just end up in the compost bin next week, but we will see.

 

I still have some carrots in the ground and the tomato plants actually produced edible fruit this year beginning in early August. Thank God I don’t have to grow enough food to feed myself for a whole year. I don’t know how large a garden you would need to produce enough food to feed a family for a year. That knowledge has mostly disappeared in Canada and much of the industrialized countries. We could gain it back if we had to but most of us would be dead by the time enough food was grown, assuming our farmers stopped producing and the truckers stopped bringing the food to us.

 

I don’t know why we don’t have factory farms in the cities that could grow veggies year round. I imagine it has something to do with cost, but it would be a smart thing for the governments to subsidize. Hey, I just wrote a sentence that had “smart” and “government” in it.

 

So, tomorrow maybe we will have Spaghetti squash for dinner but I will keep the number of the local pizza joint handy just in case.