---
title: "Indeterminate / Squash"
date: 2026-06-15
tags: post
---

The hardest part of gardening is not correctly timing the seedling transfer, or deciding when a plant is a goner versus when it just needs one more week. The hardest part of gardening, at least for me, is resisting the urge to make cheap and facile metaphors.

One example comes to mind from this weekend, when I was trellising a handful of truly overgrown cherry tomato plants. Cherry tomatoes are indeterminate, which means there's no size at which they stop growing and start to ripen. They're like mint, secretly — they will happily grow and grow and grow forever. The only thing stopping them, barring human intervention, is the comic rapidity with which they'll die: from blight, from dehydration, from sheer overextension — almost as quickly as they prospered, if not more so.

There are a lot of ways to curtail this, and one of the things we do is trellis. We've got this very fun, K'nex-esque trellis system that acts as a kind of three-dimensional grid. The tricky bit is that you can't really set it up before you've set up the tomato; you build the trellis *around* the plant, carefully, using it as an opportunity to find which branches are in danger of touching the ground. It's a satisfying exercise in its own right. Often, when Haley and I tear down the tomato crop for the year, we'll sit for a minute and just look at our lovely little cityscape of green rods and connectors before we tear those down too and throw them in the bucket. Because as cool as they look, there's no real reason to keep them around in an empty bed.

And of course structure is necessary but insufficient. So we did the things one does when tomatoes are overgrown. First, Lucy and I started with the two existential threats. Anything in danger of stooping down to touch the bare ground had to be either scaffolded immediately or mercifully pruned. Then came the work of trying to establish a sight line to the soil, which is a useful proxy for two things: airflow and sunlight. The plants had a couple of little yellow bits here and there, but no blight — nothing too serious.

From there we moved on to the more qualitative work, and in doing so started to discover just how bountiful these couple of plants had been. I tried not to wince at every little tug Lucy gave at the root. Slowly and surely, the plants started to look less grisly, less insanely overgrown, until the garden resembled a garden and not a jungle — something I could show my mother-in-law with pride and not fear.

And finally, at the end of this week-long journey — every morning Lucy waking up with me, having a few eggs, and going outside before the humidity made the prospect unbearable — we discovered the very back of the garden, hidden and prospering all this time: a terrific squash plant, happy and beaming, its first fruit ready not to be plucked or picked but cut with one ginger motion.

For the past three days, Lucy has refused to eat anything until she gets to go look at her squash. I do not like squash, and yet it appears it has now earned a permanent place in our harvest.

![Lucy holding her squash in the backyard](/img/lucys-squash.png)