The backyard garden.  Let me first say that I’d love to have one, but also freely admit that I don’t have the time nor the inclination for its maintenance and upkeep.  That being said, I may have stumbled across a revolutionary way to both have my cake – and eat it, too.

First, a little back story.

At the back of my yard, by the alleyway, stands an old and gnarled elm tree.  It barely gets any leaves on it every year, and stands as a twisted and ugly sentinel, guarding the back edge of my property line.  I swear it’s auditioning to be in a horror movie and it secretly longs to be part of a decrepit lawn at a haunted house somewhere.

Anyway, for the past ten years, I’ve used the base of this tree as my yard waste dumping ground.  Every season I pile up sticks, leaves, weeds, rotten apples (from “Bobby”, my dwarf apple tree at the front of the yard), and assorted other organic matter.  As luck would have it, the soil at the base of that ugly elm is some of the richest in my yard, black as coal, and just full of all sorts of good organic nutrients.

So last year, I had purchased some pumpkins for the fall season.  They decorated my porch until mid-November, when Mother Nature began to turn them into soft and rotting goo.  I took said pumpkins and added them to my waste pile in the back and forgot about them.  The local hoodlums (aka “townies”) also helped the decomposition process by smashing them even further in late November, and I picked up the remnants and added them back to the pile.

This year, with all of the rain and humid weather we’ve had, a remarkable thing happened.

I suddenly have a pumpkin patch at the base of the elm tree.

It started slowly, but after a few good rainfalls, the vines really took off, covering all of the waste pile and spreading out into the yard itself.  The plants now have dozens of blossoms on their twisting vines, and a few pumpkins have already started to form.

I’ve performed absolutely no maintenance on them, just letting the plants run free and do whatever nature wants with them.

If they can survive the “townies” this fall, I may even have some pumpkins to put back on the porch (but I’m not holding my breath on that score).

This is the kind of gardening I can get behind.  Throw out some rotting fruit and veg, then wait until the next year and watch new plants grow on the garbage heap.

Maybe next year, I’ll toss out some spoiled tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and some cilantro and grow the ingredients for some garbage-pile salsa.

Mmmmmmmm, compost salsa!!