Share Croppin'

Mike Holden, an old timer gave my family some pumpkin seeds from a huge jack-o-lantern like squash he cultivated organically with goat’s milk and pig shit.

He grew the largest pumpkin ever to enter competition at the county fair. According to reporters with the local newspaper, The Daily News, the vegetable was "monstrous".

Old Mike, a geezer who looked like a monster himself, was like a grandfather to everyone in town. He was particularly close to my family. We rented farm land from him to grow our food.

Our family didn’t plant things like pumpkins in our fields. At planting time, when the Farmer’s Almanac gave clear timetables for planting, the seeds sat in the garage inside a glass mason jar.

Our crops consisted of corn, green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers and zucchini. I took it upon myself to plant those Jack and the Bean Stalk seeds on land which we did not rent.

I filled a cardboard box from a case of beer with ashes from the wood stove and top soil from the back yard and popped the magical seeds in the box of dirt in late Spring. Local cats pissed in my home made flower bed like a litter box and I nearly abandoned my sprouting love for gardening.

One day, little seedlings popped their heads up and seemed to be thirsting for more earth. I watched as one of the three sprouting leaflets struggled to pop the shell of a white pumpkin seed from its head.

Feeling responsible for playing God, I immediately planted the cat pumpkins in a wild strawberry patch adjacent to my family’s share cropping farm.

Summer slowly passed and I forgot about the little magical Mike Holden seeds and the plants I started in a cardboard box.

I hated when we went to Mike’s farm to work like slaves in the cotton fields of the south. The summer heat was unbearable and little swarming bugs called gnats circled our heads like vultures. There was no time or reason to check-up on famous pumpkin seeds with ancestors that outgrew the pages of The Daily News.

One September evening, while picking the last of an abundant tomato harvest with the family, I walked to the edge of the field to take a pee and stumbled upon a huge pumpkin that was still green.

I squeezed my little pecker to stop the flow from landing smack on top of my blue ribbon winning vegetable. It was too late-- I cleansed the crop by mistake.

It grew larger than I was at the tender age of seven. I never told the family how I fertilized a pumpkin that grew even larger than Mike’s.

"We can get at least six pecks of pumpkin from that," said my family as they eyed my masterpiece ready to begin the canning process.

Months later, in late October, I picked the pumpkin and carved a Jack-O-Lantern with a big wide open mouth and told my family the crop wasn’t fit for eatin’.