Squashing Assumptions in the Garden

So there I am--a mental wreck, afraid to do anything to Charlotte because what I do will probably be all wrong. I may ruin her.

Every so often I’m struck by how dumb I am about something.

This happens when I read a book or get a letter from an expert on a particular subject. You’d think this would solve my stupidity problem. No, it only makes it worse. What’s more, it complicates my life, and I can never go back to my previous condition of blissful ignorance.

Take Charlotte Armstrong and my wife’s zucchini plants, for example. Charlotte Armstrong is the rose bush I gave my wife several years ago on her birthday to stop her from complaining that I never bought her any roses. Charlotte has been my responsibility since I first potted her in a planter box in our front patio.

I prune her, fertilize her and sometimes I water her when my wife asks me to water her container garden. My wife usually takes care of the watering because she enjoys communing with her tomatoes, peppers, squash and herbs.

Last fall, I pruned Charlotte’s branches down to some short stubs. The man at the nursery where I bought her said I should prune her during a certain winter month. I forgot which month, so I pruned before Thanksgiving. Charlotte has been magnificent this summer, yielding at times a dozen roses at a cutting.

Her crowning achievement, however, has been a gorgeous “candelabra growth.” I’d never heard of a candelabra growth until my wife gave me this pamphlet that came with a pair of pruning shears. This marked the start of my problems with Charlotte.

“When you discover candelabra growth beginning to develop, special care will be called for. I recommend you look at it, marvel at nature’s way, but do not touch it with your pruners,” the booklet said.

My blissful ignorance began to crumble. The little book then went on to tell about a system of pinching out the center of a certain bud and how that bud will send out strong secondary growth. If you do everything correctly, you’ll have candelabra growths for three years to come, it promised.

I cannot find that certain bud and I’m afraid to try. What’s more, the booklet failed to tell me what to do when the big annual pruning time arrived, which it said should be in late January and early February-- not before Thanksgiving.

I don’t know how I achieved that candelabra growth, which I didn’t know existed in the first place, with my wrong month pruning. And, what’s worse, I learned I didn’t know how to prune. I didn’t realize there was such an art to pruning. Obviously, I did something right, but I don’t know what.

So there I am--a mental wreck, afraid to do anything to Charlotte because what I do will probably be all wrong. I may ruin her. And then I’ll have to start buying roses from a florist now that my wife has got a taste for roses, and that can be expensive.

But that’s not all. There are my wife’s zucchini plants. Like Charlotte, I now know more about zucchini than I care to know, because of the thoughtfulness of Dr. Frank Ellis of Los Alamitos. Now the blissful ignorance has gone out of zucchini, too.

The good Dr. Ellis informs me that squash plants are “monoecious.” That is, he says, both male and female flowers are on the same plant. (That’s cozy!)

“Insects take care of the pollination, and there is no need for artificial, or hand pollination,” as my wife was doing with a small paint brush.

“Also, contrary to your statement (in a recent column), there are not male and female squash plants, and just one plant produces all the squash one can handle, as you must know if you have ever had one zucchini plant before,” he writes in a letter to me.

He goes on to say that “the male and female squash blossoms may look superficially the same--however, if you look closely at the center of each blossom, you can differentiate the pollen-bearing stamens from the stigma on the pistil. (I can?) In addition, the fertilized ovary at the base of the flower begins to enlarge rapidly, before the blossom has withered, differentiating the female from the male blossom.”

I’ve been looking, Dr. Ellis, I’ve been looking! (My neighbor thought I’d lost something and came over to help look.) It dismays me to realize there is so much voyeurism connected with growing squash.