Hidden out in my garden like a superhero in his secret lair are
a couple of plants I still can’t identify.
Hidden out in my garden like a superhero in his secret lair are a couple of plants I still can’t identify.
I don’t remember planting them, but then, it was a couple of months ago that I stuck everything in the ground – scattering seeds here and there in the hopes that something might grow. More plants popped up than I had expected, and some of those have even thrived.
I’ve managed to figure out all but two. We got tomatoes, beans, basil and poppies – all easy enough to figure out. But still there are two that perplex me. One is growing in a fairly shallow container, has light green, kind of fuzzy leaves and pretty purple flowers. It doesn’t get as much sun as the rest of the garden, but it seems happy where it is. I keep thinking it’s borage, but then I remember that I have never bought any borage – seeds or plants. So there goes that theory. I’m waiting for it to produce fruit to help me identify it, because so far, it doesn’t match the illustrations on any of the seed packets I have.
The other plant isn’t quite so mysterious – it’s squash. I know for certain that it’s squash, but what I’m not sure about is how it came to be in my garden in more than one spot.
You see, it looks like those little mini-pumpkins you see around Halloween – the ones that are too hard to carve, but that everyone draws faces on with magic markers. Only mine aren’t very orange, and I can’t figure out for the life of me why I would plant those in the garden.
Perhaps they’re still pretty yellow because it’s not close enough to Halloween to turn orange yet, but that doesn’t explain how they got there.
Mini-squash is not my style. If I’m going to plant a pumpkin, it’s going to be a big one, one that I can carve a giant jack o’ lantern face into. Not some tiny desk-top pumpkin that I have to draw on. And yet, there they are. I believe there are two of those plants that materialized in my garden.
I’m hopeful that these plants will mature soon so I can figure out exactly what they are. Who knows? Those little pumpkins may still grow into regular-sized ones, with any luck.
