Harvest season stories

The frost is on the pumpkin, and fall harvest is underway. ‘Tis the season for crop price reports and other scary stories.

This past spring started out cold and wet, which made planting both a challenge and a chore. Seeding my garden was less a matter of making nice, straight rows and more like manufacturing mud pies. When I finally got it planted, my garden closely resembled a chewed-up construction site.

Unsurprisingly, a garden that was reluctant to receive seed was also reluctant to grow. Except for the weeds, of course. They seemed to be just fine with the cold, wet conditions.

After about a month of patience — and, like Toad, singing “Grow, grow” to my garden on a regular basis — I concluded that I was facing a germination annihilation. Some stuff was sprouting, but the bulk of the garden remained a lumpy black canvas.

In a panic, I rushed to a farm supply store and purchased a random selection of garden seeds. I then sowed the seeds without any thought regarding spacing and what went where.

Wouldn’t you know it? Every stupid seed that was so thoughtlessly and carelessly planted grew.

I was at first pleased, of course. But then some plants that belonged to the gourd family began to display megalomaniacal tendencies, commandeering large swathes of the planet. I wasn’t at all surprised when I stumbled upon a gourd out in the grass a quarter of a mile from the garden.

My pumpkins also grew like weeds, but I’ve always had good luck with raising those orange orbs. Not so with cantaloupes. I have never been able to grow one larger than a softball, and this year was no exception. Anyone up for a game of slow pitch?

Anyhow, I now find myself in possession of several dozen possible future jack-o-lanterns. I may lobotomize and carve one or two of them, but the question remains as to what to do with the remainder.

Our youngest son, who is always up for adventure, suggested that we build a pumpkin chucker. I imagine this would be sort of like a potato gun, but on a much larger scale. Or maybe what he had in mind was a trebuchet, which is the same thing as a catapult. Except in this case, it would be a “pumpkinpult.”

But the whole idea was a non-starter for me. First off, there’s the waste of perfectly good, potential food items. Then there is the mental image of all those hapless pumpkins hurtling through the atmosphere and hitting the earth with a mighty splat. Oh, the humanity.

My wife purchased some pepper plants for me, some of which turned out to be of the habanero variety. Habanero peppers, I have discovered, can transform a bowl of “blah” chili into a substance that can best be described as “weapons grade.”

Habanero peppers should only be handled by trained nuclear physicists. This became clear to me recently when I began to feel a strange burning sensation in my ear shortly after chopping a habanero. It then dawned on me that I had excavated earwax with the same hand that had just manhandled some chopped habanero peppers.

I won’t discuss what happened with some of my more intimate and sensitive body parts. Let’s just say that it will be some time before I’ll have to worry about nasal hair.

And now for the scary story. One fall, when our oldest son was about 10, he and his little brother and their cousin, Adam, decided to camp out in our front yard. A tent was pitched and as darkness descended, I was invited inside for an inspection.

The boys begged me to tell them a ghost story. On the spot, I concocted a tale about three boys who went camping in the woods only to find themselves being picked off one by one by a supernaturally smart and bloodthirsty wolf.

Precisely at the apex of the story, our farm dog began snuffling noisily at the outer perimeter of the tent. The three boys squealed and jumped up and ran for the house, having decided that camping outdoors at night wasn’t for them.

My wife was waiting for me at the door. “What sort of scary story did you tell them?” she demanded.

I told her that it wasn’t particularly creepy, but that the dog had contributed some highly effective sound effects at a very crucial moment.

“Oh, sure,” she replied, “Blame the dog. You big meanie.”

They’re just lucky that I didn’t tell them a really frightening story. I’m thinking of something along the lines of a catapult attack by a group of mutant zombie habanero peppers.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.