Friday, April 15, 2011

Squash as a landscaping solution

After several years of living the city life in Boston, Mike and I bought a home in Maine, complete with 10 acres of land, a barn, a run-in, a chicken coop, and big dreams of sheep, chickens, and an enormous vegetable garden.

Upon getting to know our new home better, we quickly learned that the prior owners had not merely owned sheep because they're so darn cute. The sheep also let them keep the grass down without doing any landscaping to smooth out the dramatic lumps and bumps that "add character" to the lawn. Since I'm not quite ready to become a shepherd (next year, folks), and the idea of spending thousands of dollars to smooth out the lawn was sobering, we started brainstorming temporary solutions. Last summer, we dealt with the unmanageability of the most treacherous sections of the lawn by letting the weeds take over, and then in August my father and Mike had a spectacular weed whacking adventure. We've decided to try something different this year (although I must say, the weed whacking was very entertaining for us bystanders).

At this point, it's necessary to note that I absolutely love squash. Going to the "squash lady" near my parents' house each fall is as exciting as Christmas morning. So I thought that a nice temporary solution to our unmowable lawn would be to cover it with squash. Then we won't have a yard overtaken with weeds, and we'll have a bounty of squash. Win win, right?

So our first plan for our garden involved planting about 8 varieties of squash on the bumpy west (*I might mean east) side of our house. Mike and I aren't very good at starting small, though, so the plan has since changed....

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