The Shitty Gardener

Some months ago I told my partner that I wanted to grow a garden. It was something I hadn’t done since I was a kid, though back then I hadn’t really gardened either. It was more about leaving the thing to its own devices and coming out with is turnips the size of your head.

Yet on my birthday I came home to find a cedar box in the backyard full of already planted vegetables, as well as a set of hydraulic oil pails that housed some peppers and two canvas sacks that contained potatoes. Best of all he’d run a sort of watering system through it.

It was like the idiot’s garden, and I was thrilled. All I had to do was check for weeds every few days.

In the mornings, I would go out and look at my spiralling green charges and wonder at the way they seemed to grow overnight. This was partially because I’d begged for squash, and it really does grow a noticeable amount—if not every day then every week—extending like a long, stretching arm.

I watched as the potato plants climbed and the tomatoes filled out and spread like hips. We were perplexed by the orange bell peppers and how they seemed intent on becoming long green, finger-like things. We thought that perhaps the wrong ones had been bought. Then they turned red and we waited for orange. They wilted. We ate them anyway. They tasted like peppers.

Meanwhile the squash crawled out of the box and seemed to be making a run for the fence, as if things were so bad with us that it needed to escape. We watched as it split itself into different tendrils and then rooted itself down into the grass every few feet so that we could no longer mow the lawn. It was like the premise for some horror movie where the plants decide to rise up and eat us instead.

Then the squash began to wrap itself around other plants, the odd, spring-like parts of new vines climbing onto our tomato plants and trying to choke out our jalapenos. I kept having to pull the squash back to where it belonged. It was like separating two tussling fighters.

By now the squash gourds were the size of my feet, squashing down the overgrown grass with their heft.

“What do you think it wants?” my partner asked me in a whisper.

“To take over the world.”

“What should we do?”

“The only thing we can do,” I said calmly, pulling a pair of hedge clippers from behind my back, “We roast it.”