Saturday, September 4, 2010

Backyard Adventures

The weather has turned glorious today. I know it's fickle. I know it'll warm up again. But for today, I'm gonna pretend that autumn has come. So, we're outside a little today -- well, more than we were. Julia's been working on this fort/hut. She got the weeds from ... where else? Our garden.
Julia and Adam picked apples from our 2 trees last week, and they've been sitting around the kitchen, driving me nuts ever since. They were a little beaten and worse for the wear, but I peeled, cored and sliced them, and am stewing apples today. I gave some to our neighbors, and this is the second batch.
I told Adam it would be great if he weed-eated the garden, so that I could find my potato plants and start digging potatoes. He used the weed-eater, and then decided it would be easier just to MOW THE GARDEN, since there was hardly anything left in there. We thought. And ... Julia found our backyard turtle. We hadn't seen him in over a year. But in our yard, that's not surprising - haha! She painted a big "J" on his back with sparkly purple nail polish. I think I'll call him Jerome.

Anyway, I tramped through part of the garden and found a watermelon! And Adam had told me that there weren't anymore in there. A few minutes later, after he'd been mowing, he walked to the house with a much larger melon in his hand. Part of it was already sliced off. Or should I say MOWED off!?
He cleaned it up and declared it delicious. It's been an adventurous day so far.

2 comments:

GretchenJoanna said...

Hilarious, but so familiar--how easy it is for gardens to get out of control, but for some of us, every year is an adventure out of The Secret Garden. So glad you found Jerome, who I would say must be a hermitish sort of guy, to be happy hiding all that time.

mdiber said...

We have a garden at the park. There are maybe 10 acres of community garden. It is on a hill and the soil is so poor it gets rock hard like cement. On top of that we don't have enough grass to cut for clippings, which you've heard about already! Sooooo... this year we planted oats as soon as we could get in (April 15) and let them brow about 6 inches. Then Joel tilled only the area that we planted and we have kept mowing the paths between and the oats serve as what we call green manure as well as helping us not to have to pull a whole lot more weeds than we'd like to keep a tidy garden. We did have one watermelon but I picked it too soon,waaaaayyy too soon.