PLANT IT
Smile when the squash gets cheeky
November 21, 2009
Sonia Day
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
No, I haven't been trolling for porn on the Internet.
The bodacious babe in the photo is, believe it or not, a butternut squash. She squeezed herself between the planks of a backyard fence in west-end Toronto this August. And – brr! – she's going to stay there, all winter, cheeks bared to the wind and snow.
"It's a rare squash that can make people smile as much as this one has," Cameron Drew, her owner, says with a laugh. "I was going to harvest it for Thanksgiving, but now I think I'll leave it there for the winter months, when smiles are needed the most."
The squash assumed its decidedly provocative posture by accident, he explains.
"It was an experiment in vertical space gardening," says Drew, who lives with his wife, Rebecca, and kids in Toronto's Dovercourt Park neighbourhood. "This was my first season growing squash and I hadn't really noticed its shape until a neighbour, Sara Katz, giggled and said what it reminded her of."
The fence faces an alleyway behind Drew's backyard. Like many city gardeners, he has only a tiny, jam-packed space for veggies, so he tried training some things to grow skywards. But the butternut vine that produced this particular specimen didn't take kindly to the idea. It climbed only halfway up the fence, then stopped. And because the big leaves of butternuts tend to mask developing fruit underneath, Ms Cheeky got wound around the planking and proved impossible to coax out.
Not that anyone wanted her to move.
On the contrary. "For some reason, it made everyone happy," says Drew, who works for Indigo Books & Music's e-books division, Shortcovers.
"The alleyway is one of those places where the neighbourhood bumps into itself and people keep coming over to take a look.
"Rebecca calls it the bumnut squash."
So, although her plump, tanned flesh will inevitably shrivel and wither away during the long, cold season ahead, Ms Cheeky is a fixture for now.
And you thought gardening was boring....
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Toronto Star