too funny! thanks for the chuckle.

mixter

"Leslie" wrote in message
...
This being my second vegetable garden to include more than tomatoes, I
anticipated a plentiful crop and imagined drying and canning tons of foods
planted, tended, and harvested by me alone. It must have been a dream. I
had
a section of what I thought at first were pumpkin plants. I dutifully
transplanted them to spread them out. Initially I put them in among the
corn
because my mom said pumpkins will grow up the stalks and do well that way.
Then I remembered that the pumpkin seeds I had bought were the extremely
large jack-o-lantern kind. Re-transplanted them so they wouldn't pull the
corn over. Didn't matter in the end since my ever-helpful 3-year-old twin
boys yanked up all but 4 corn stalks along with the carrots. When the
"pumpkin"plants got a few inches tall I thought they were cucumbers,
thinking that my boys had spread some of the seeds in a spot I didn't
notice. Hmm, they grew and got fruit on them that almost looked like
watermelon. Watermelon?? I didn't buy watermelon seeds! Must have been the
compost. Then a texture developed that was unmistakebly canteloupe. Ah-ha!
Definitely the compost. I had a lovely compost bin full of several years
worth of food and yard scraps. We must have eaten a ton (give or take a
few
pounds) of canteloupe during that time, so that's where those seeds came
from. So my pumpkin-cucumber-watermelon-canteloupes are doing great. Nice
looking fruit. I love canteloupe. Then along come my boys. They brutally
tore off 10 or so of the melons and tossed them in the compost bin. As I
inspected them there, I also discovered they had picked probably 30
very-green tomatoes. Next year I'm building a fence around my garden. Oh,
did I tell you my beets didn't grow at all? I do have yummy tomatoes, the
ones that are allowed to ripen. Off to read more of my organic gardening
book. I'm going to master this gardening stuff one of these years.

Leslie