BUTTERNUT SQUASH. There’s lots of big, fat butternut winter squash in my garden and checking out the Weekly Wednesday Sale at the local Mega Grocery store, I took a look at their squash price for Butternut squash. $2.50 a pound. Wow. For a pound of squash. This was never why I garden, I do it for the high quality of food that I get from doing it compared to the cardboard nutrition-free crap the stores all sell, but at $2.50 a pound for squash, $3 a pound for tasteless, rubbery tomatoes, gardening becomes more than eating healthy, it can be economic survival too.
I grow butternut and acorn squashes for Fall-Winter eating, yellow squash for summer, cucumbers for salads, snacks and pickling, lettuce for salads and sandwiches, beefsteak and cherry tomatoes, beets, radishes, cilantro, bunch onions sometimes, and figs, apricots and grapes. No bug sprays or chemical fertilizers.
Maybe gardening is more than that, even. It feels good to provide for myself, to directly feed myself from the Earth. It’s fulfilling.