Mislabeled Seeds

Each year Grandpa would grow a garden, much of what he grew was eaten fresh during the summer.  We always dug new potatoes and enjoyed them with creamed peas but the bulk of the potatoes were harvested in October and stored in an underground root cellar that harbored spiders of seemingly, at least to a boy, every venomous kind.  Now as an adult, I know there was only one venomous spider that resided in that cellar.  But going there to get some potatoes for Grandma was not high on my list of favorite things to do.  I shouldn’t complain, however, as my mother recalls when she was a girl, she had to go into the root cellar they had dug at their ranch house on the dry farms above town.  She said she would go in there with a light and all the little rattlesnake heads would be peeking out at her from between the rocks of the cellar walls.  That would have been a deal breaker for me.  No wonder she had a deathly fear of snakes that haunted her until she died.  Grandpa also grew squash.  He loved both banana and hubbard squash.  We sometimes grew one large enough to take to the fair in the fall but most of them were stored in the basement until they would be eaten during the winter.  Each year he would buy the seeds to plant his squash.  One year, when I was about 12 we planted all the squash as we usually did but when they began to grow it became obvious that something was amiss.  The normal banana squash we were expecting to see were not there.  In their place were pumpkins.  By the time fall arrived, Grandpa had resigned himself to a winter without his beloved banana squash.  He told me that I could take the pumpkins and sell them for jack o lanterns if I wanted to and that I could keep whatever money I made.  This sounded like a winning proposition to me.  I tended the pumpkins, carefully observing their progress as they turned from dark green to bright orange.  I approached the only grocer in town to see if he would be interested in buying them once they ripened in the fall.  I sold the entire crop that first year and pocketed a few dollars.  I asked Grandpa if I could grow more the following year and he agreed.  Before I outgrew this little endeavor, I was selling pumpkins to a wholesaler in the nearest large city and making enough money to feel good about myself.  Of course, I was too immature to realize that I had no overhead since Grandpa footed the bills without ever once mentioning that to me.  That first summer, when the pumpkins began to grow and the vines started to spread voraciously, it was apparent we weren’t growing banana squash.  It wasn’t a miracle we were seeing, it was the result of faulty packaging.  Pumpkin seeds had mistakenly been placed in a banana squash seed packet.  But I learned that day that no matter what the package says, it’s the genetic code that counts.  What you plant is what you will harvest, regardless of what the package says.  The law of the harvest is invariable.  There are no exceptions and yet I have ignored it, thinking that planting pumpkin seeds would produce banana squash.  What we plant is what we will harvest.  It’s not a law that can be circumvented, regardless of how much we want to deceive ourselves into believing that it can.  It’s a lesson best learned early, respected always, and trusted implicitly.