Tales of Perplexing Produce From Farmers and Gardeners [Opinion]

'It's been a weird year.' If I've heard that comment once, I've heard it a dozen times. Crop farmers, produce growers, orchardists, gardeners and just folks in general seem to be in agreement on this summer's growing season: Weird. Extreme, record-setting heat. Extreme, record-setting cool nights. Droughty conditions early on to the extent that even well-tended lawns looked lackluster, and farmers worried over the lack of moisture to get crops of all sorts growing as they should. Then, like the flip of the calendar, moisture began arriving on a much-needed basis — WAY more than needed in case of flooded areas — and our landscapes went lushly green. And weeds are growing like ... well, weeds, including vines that snake around and over anything nearby. I've lopped down redroot and wild lettuce and jimsonweeds taller than I am. Even some of the garden produce seems to have taken a turn for the unexpected and perplexing. A case in point is a hefty spaghetti squash thriving in our lawn border a few feet up in climbing rose bush. Any attempt to disengage the vines from the razor-sharp thorns would guarantee bloody, painful wounds. Only time will resolve this unlikely entanglement. Everyone who grows zucchini has tales of the monsters that lurk under wide leaves and emerge suggesting some alien invader. This year's version here measured 18-inches long and resembled a pudgy, dark-green, half-grown piglet. Figuring the chickens wouldn't touch that tough, fibrous thing, I plunked it down on the porch as a visual reminder of how NOT to grow squash. Ten minutes later, the hens were attacking it like a stray bug, pecking holey in-roads into the fat, round end of the overgrown thing. It took them a couple of days, but they eventually cleaned out the entire overgrown zucchini, leaving only the shriveled outer rind. Had I purposely given it to them, they would have turned their picky beaks up and sneaked off to steal wax begonia blossoms off the porch box plants. Peter Piper could've picked pecks of pickles here from the burpless and pickling varieties' vines trained up trellising against the south side of our calf barn. As it was, the yields have ended up in more jars of bread and butter pickles than I ever 'put up' before, countless servings of cucumber slaw and numerous donations to cucumber-less friends. But as the vines have aged, the cukes have gotten oversized, funky and misshapen. So, when a neighbor last week offered me a bunch of strawberry plants they were dividing, the fading vines got yanked in favor of a berry bed. One trellis of cukes was left, for salad additions and to see just how big a huge yellowing one that has grown out through both sides of the trellis wire will grow. It will take a ladder (or bucket?) to stand on to slice the submarine-suggestive veggie away from its attachment to the wire, high above my head. The beautiful stand of sweet corn I'd hand-planted in the garden mid-summer brought me to a stunned standstill, when I found the entire back of the patch badly leaning to one side and partly on the ground. My first fleeting thought — honestly — was that a bear had rolled in it. Duh. We have no bears around here. But a nasty storm that had pounded through earlier came with fierce, shifting winds and likely a small microburst blasted the stalks sideways and down. Now it seems the meadow deer are adding insult to injury by stomping through and tangling the stalks even worse. Groundhogs were initially on my blame-radar, until I realized something was chomping off the pole string bean leaves atop a five-foot trellis next to the corn. We don't have five-foot-tall groundhogs. Thank goodness. Along with being perplexing, garden produce seems to have a sense of humor, growing all sorts of strange appendages, like our carrot 'octopus' with a half-dozen crooked legs, snowmen-shaped potatoes and a beet sporting a cartoon-like pointy nose poking out to one side. But few produce items are more perplexing and memorable than those experienced by at least two neighbors in recent times. Cutting into watermelons they'd purchased, both families were shocked and dismayed when the melons literally exploded, sending reddish mush and sticky juice onto every nearby surface. One neighbor had to take down and wash all their kitchen curtains in order to clean up the badly-splattered melon goo. Those melons were both purchased ones, not home-grown, so who knows how long they'd been in transit, or parked somewhere, en route from some distant picking site. Sitting somewhere not chilled during hot weather can ferment a ripe melon in short order. So, if your holiday picnic this weekend includes a watermelon, be warned. You might want to cut it out in the backyard — or maybe in the shower.