Garden Awards - Spring 2011

Well now that spring has ended, maybe not officially, but since we have had several days in a row of 100 plus degrees of temperature what the calendar might say is moot.  Spring is done - that ship has sailed so long ago you can't even see it anymore on the horizon.  Now all that is left is the memories and I thought it might be interesting to chronicle this years 'Best of Spring'.

Still going in spite of the drought.

In spite of months of steady drought there was some great competition in the Vegetable Garden segment of the Best of Spring and I just want to give a hand to all of the contestants in all categories.  Great job of enduring the scant rainfall and still producing some record crops.

From upper left, clockwise:  Big Beef, Early Girl, Black Krim and Zebra Stripe

Under the Tomato Category we had four strong contestants including Big Beef, Early Girl, Zebra Stripe and Black Krim.  You all did a great job despite a serious case of creeping late blight but as you know there can be only one winner and that award goes to Big Beef for the most awesome production of large sized fruits, virtually no blossom end rot and continued production even as the weather has started to warm up.  Second place was a tough call with Zebra Stripe producing a large number of medium sized fruits and Black Krim producing a moderate number of large sized fruits.  It was a narrow margin but I have to hand it to the Black Krim who not only is continuing to produce but also has avoided more fruit rot and late blight.  Congratulations!

Big Beef for the win!

Under the Cucumber Category we had three contestants including Straight Eight, Burpless Hybrid and Burpless.  For the second year in a row it was a landslide by Burpless.  You win in consistent production, large sized fruits with few seeds and most importantly a resistance to powdery mildew.

Burpless cucumber.

Under the Onion Category we have two contestants, Red and Yellow who started off life in the grocery section as 'Pearl Onions'.  Having cast that lowly designation behind you both of you have excelled in production and hardiness, sneering at the low twenties weather of late winter.  So it is a tie for first place.

Yellow and Red onions.

The Pepper Category had several old favorites, Gypsy and Tam Jalapeno (mild) and some new hopefuls, Ancho, Cubanelle and Marconi.  First fruit goes to the Cubanelle but it and the Marconi suffered some early season interference from the Zebra Stripe tomato, so unfortunately their productivity was diminished.  However, there is a clear outstanding winner this year and it is the Ancho who has consistently produces large numbers medium sized dark green fruit and currently is covered with more than a dozen more developing fruit.  Second in this category goes to Tam Jalapeno who may pull ahead in the summer division of the games by sheer tenacity of production.

Ancho Pepper.

Upcoming Hopefuls Category.  We are keeping our eyes on our summer contenders of Eggplant, Bush and Pole beans, Okra and Sweet Potatoes as well as Golden Yukon Potatoes.  The Clemson Spineless Okra has already been producing an ever increasing crop daily and we have already enjoyed several batches from the bush and pole beans.  We look forward to your continued productivity.  All eyes are on the Eggplants who are almost ready to present their first fruits.  We expect great things from you.  The Golden Yukon and Sweet Potatoes are new to the contest this year and we have no idea what to expect.  Who knows if we will even know when to harvest them, so this could be some exciting developments.

Clemson Spineless Okra

Eggplant.

We are also nervously watching the canteloupes and wondering what more will befall those poor vines who have already suffered powdery mildew and then leaf burn on two occasions from our attempts to control powdery mildew.  In spite of this there is renewed vigor in the vines and there are two well formed fruit and a few others that seem to be developing.  Stay tuned - this could turn into a best of or a worst of experience.

Rouge Amaryllis follow no rules.

Now stepping away from the Vegetables let's take a look at the Ornamental Category.  There is a definite clear victory of blooming that must be awarded to the rogue group of Amaryllis.  These hardy bulbs stood up against bulb bias and have bloomed multiple times in the last six months.  Way to defy Amaryllis lore!

From top left, clockwise:  Cosmos, Viola, Scented Geranium and Scaveola

For the general Ornamental Category we had several contestants this year including Cosmos, Viola, Scaveola and Scented Geraniums.  The Viola were early winners but languished in late spring.  The clear winner due to voracious growth and toleration of the lack of rain goes to the Scented Geraniums.  You smell great, you look great and you are determined to take over your garden bed.  That's the kind of pluck we look for in an ornamental.  Good Job.

Heavenly Scented Geranium

No Awards would be complete without Honorable Mentions.  Best Volunteer goes to the Cherry Tomatoes.  You started life in the backwaters of the compost piles and have gone on to delight both Dog and Humans with highly productive lives.  We look forward to seeing you again next year as well.  We also want to give a shout out to the compost pile without whom the rest of the garden would be a shadow of its glorious self.  Thanks for your continued support.

Volunteer Cherry Tomatoes

Unsung Hero - Compost

Finally we wanted to give a nod to a little guy that has a category all to himself.  Introducing the Baby Anole Lizard.  Already he has done well for himself by staying in the dog free part of the garden which shows good marks for intelligence.  He wins the award for cutest wildlife.

Baby Anole Lizard

Fire Ants

Ah, who doesn't remember their first meeting with a life long nemesis.  I first met mine when I was a child and it was as memorable as it was unpleasant.  I was outside with my mother and I stepped into a small hill of dirt. In a few seconds it felt like my legs were on fire.

I looked down to see my bare legs covered with these dark spots.  What seemed like a hundred ants were swarming up my legs and stinging me.  My quick thinking mother rushed me over to the garden hose and washed off the ants.  It was horrible for us both, me because I had been stung many times and her because she had to witness it.  That was my first encounter but not my last.  Not my last at all.

This marked a new era in the habitation of our fields.  Previous to this there had been ants, but they were in no way a bother to us.  I am not sure what kind they were, but I don't recall ever getting stung.  The fire ant, originally a Brazilian native had been steadily making its way from its entry point in Alabama since the 1930s.  It reached our fields by the 1960s and forever changed our world.

Fire ants became a constant menace of outdoor play.  All of us children became wary of any mounds of earth that sprang up in our fields, knowing this was the sign of a fire ant nest. They were not confined to a mound though.  These ants would house themselves anywhere they pleased.  At first there were not many of them, but because they were an imported species without any predator in our location, they spread quickly.  They began to invade things we would normally just keep out of the rain, such as the chicken feed.  Anything organic that did not have an airtight seal was subject to their infestation.  They would house themselves under any board or mulch or hay that was on the ground.

They were a horrible menace to all the natural wildlife of the area.  Ground nesting birds were hit hard as were burrowing animals such as rabbits.  They would attack anything and everything.  We had a couple of ducks who were attacked one night and the fire ants chewed through their webbed feet.  I have been told that ducks have no feeling in the webbing of their feet, so they did not suffer pain, but they ended up with feet that looked more like a chicken's foot.

We became very wary, my cousins and I as we traversed the fields around our houses.  Although the ants might be concentrated mostly in their mounds, they also foraged far and wide.  We could encounter them practically anywhere.  We learned to treat their stings by applying mud, the same thing we did with wasp stings.  As we had ample encounters with them we learned a little bit more about them.

When there was rain enough to flood the fields the fire ant colony would form floating masses.  These masses were a raft made up of the bodies of the fire ants clinging together.  Some of these mats would be as big as a dinner plate.  Woe to anyone who ran into one of these in flood water.  As soon as the ants came into contact with something dry they would swarm out of the water up onto it, be it trees, blades of grass or if you were unlucky, your leg.  One time my cousin and I found a small mat of ants and managed to scoop them up without getting stung.  We deposited the little clump of ants near a fire ant mound that was high and dry - don't ask me why we were being so nice to them.  The next day we came back to the mound and found a whole bunch of dead ant bodies around the mound.  Apparently the ants were very territorial and the ones we brought to the mound were from a different 'tribe' or something.  Our good deed did not go unpunished for those ants. 

Back in my childhood, the ants were definitely a rural menace, as my grandmother's house in town was free of the pests.  This is no longer true.  Today my urban garden harbors these malevolent little guys and currently I am sporting about a half dozen stings.  There are no visible mounds in our yard, but if you move a rock that lines one of the beds, look out!   I made the mistake yesterday of trying to weed one of the beds and as I knelt down pulling up several handfuls of encroaching grass I suddenly felt fire.  Actually what I felt was FIRE.  Not only does the sting hurt and burn, but my body is so trained to recognize their particular pain it goes into some sort of hyper-drive mode.

I was up in an instant doing what I like to call the fire ant dance.  The steps for this dance are simple but very fervently enacted.  Step one, you slap the offended area in a downward or outward swipe.  You want to get as many off of you as you can because the longer they are on you the more of them will bite.  Step two, while continuing to swipe, you take off whatever gloves, shirt, shoes, pants, etc. to make sure they are not in contact with you.  While you are doing step one and step two, you better have been moving away from the vicinity of the attack.  They swarm in mass and depending on the size of the nest they can cover a lot of distance quickly.

I do not react well to their bites.  They don't even have to bite me to cause a skin reaction.  If one of them just brushes against my skin it will leave a welt.  If I crush one against me while killing it, even if it doesn't bit me, it will leave a welt.  They are like the Midas of pain - just one touch is all it takes.  The initial pain of being bitten would be bad enough, but a day or so later the bites will itch like mad.  This will die down in a couple of days, only to return in the next week.  It can take more than a month for a fire ant bite to resolve.

If that wasn't bad enough, they bite my dogs as well.  My poor pups will be sitting somewhere then suddenly jump up and bite like mad at their rumps.  I find fire ant welts on them all the time.  Once my poor Lewey came running to me with a fire ant biting the inside of his nose.  There are several bugs I dislike intensely, but I hate fire ants.

We try all sorts of things to control them.  We have used fire ant bait that is advertised as 'killing the queen' because supposedly the workers will bring it to her.  Perhaps our fire ant workers are more lazy than the commercials suggest.  We saw no appreciable reduction in their numbers with that 'cure'.   A friend of my used a treatment that was made from molasses and other stuff and used to drenched the mounds.  She found it effective, but it did not work as well for me. We mostly use boiling water and this is effective at least in that it will kill bunches of the ants right away.  Unfortunately it will also kill any plants growing in the area and some of the nests are around important plants.  It also is uncertain if this method gets the queen.  No matter our efforts, we still have ants.

I had big hopes for another little ant that had been appearing in our garden the last couple of years.  These tiny little ants were red colored and ran crazy zigzag lines everywhere.  Their nests were filled with huge numbers.  Amazingly, even though they have swarmed over my hands in large numbers they have never bitten me and I have never had a skin reaction to them.  My kind of ants.  They were even talked about on the news because apparently they liked to build big nests in electrical boxes, which shorts out things.  Everyone was up in arms about the 'crazy raspberry ants' and worried about how to control them.  In one of the news shows they mentioned how these crazy ants were predators of fire ants.  My ears pick up at that.  I thought with the numbers of these little guys swarming about the fire ants would be gone soon.  No such luck.  Maybe it was the very cold winter we had or maybe it is the continuing drought, but I have not seen but a few of the crazy ants this year.  

I have been reading about a beneficial fly that is a natural predator to the fire ant.  It is called the Phorid fly.  These flies reproduce by laying eggs in the thorax of the ant.  The fly larvae migrates into the ants head and in two weeks releases an enzyme that causes the ants head to fall off.  The head FALLS OFF!  That is my kind of fly.

I don't know yet how I am going to obtain these Phorid flies, but you can bet I am on the hunt.  I cannot think of a more fitting end to my arch nemesis the fire ant.  The only thing that would make it better is if the head coming off the ant makes a little popping sound.  That way I might have the joy of  hearing a fizzing sound like a carbonated drink coming out of their nests.  Off with their heads!

Garden Photos - part 1

I just found a file with a bunch of pictures from April when the garden was looking so fresh and happy so I thought I would share them.  I know I tend to complain about gardening a bit sometimes (also known as whining and moaning) so I thought I would show that sometimes it is all worth it.  This is a part one because I have heaps and gobs of photos that I will eventually subject you to, but for now this is the garden as it was in April.

The foreground in this view is one of our original garden beds, now devoted mostly to ornamental plants and flowers.  This is mostly due to it harboring a very determined number of snails and slugs who have shown a tremendous resilience to all organic solutions.  We have tried snail bait, copper strips, ceder granules and egg shells and it hasn't even slowed them down.  We tried a beer bait lure that is supposed to entice them into drowning themselves and I think they just threw a party.  So now we don't put vegetable plants here because somehow it is less aggravating to us for them to eat the ornamentals - that way at least they are not competing for our food supply.

The middle ground to the right is another one of our original garden beds and it is hosting the cucumber patch this year.  The middle ground to the left is one of our many water stations, this one in the form of a bird bath surrounded by shrimp plant.  In the background you can see the cedar fence and part of the seven garden beds we created this year.

Here is a closer view of the birdbath and behind that you can see the tomatoes plants when they were still a reasonable size and I was all enthused about staking and trellising them.

Here are the tomato bushes up close.  There are three of them and they used to have actual space between them.  I was valiantly trying to make them be good neighbors but even this early in the season they were proving very resistant to anything that controlled their exuberant growth.  At this point they are about 4 feet tall.  If you look to the lower left of the picture you can see a green tomato, one of the many these plants produced.

Here is a closeup of one of the tomato blossoms. 

This is a photo of one of the first new beds we created this year.  It has been growing since the winter and survived through two low twenties freezes.  In the background is Swiss Chard and in front are some onions.

Here is a ground level wildlife watering stations backed by purple canna and a blooming white crinum on the left.

Here is a wild Border Collie making use of the watering station.  We originally had the bird bath for the birds and this lower watering station for whatever creatures didn't want to use the birdbath.  So this could be considered a lizard bath or something - maybe a toad pool.  Trudy however considers herself the owner of all things that hold water.

So, we gave Trudy her own Border Collie bath.  She can't get enough of it.  One of her favorite things to do is stick her face into it and blow bubbles through her nose.  Sometimes I stock her bath with baby carrots so she has something to dive for.

This anole lizard probably wants to visit the watering station since at this point in the year it had been months since there was any appreciable rain.  He is however a wary lizard which will serve him well.

This lizard on the other hand is not as wary.

He is interested in perpetuating his species and is doing the equivalent of flashing his mighty biceps to any female lizards in the area.

If he is not careful, this female will be the last thing he sees.  I have rescued several lizards from Trudy so far this year.  She does not outright kill them, but carries them around in her mouth and puts them down to play with them.  When the lizard tries to run she puts her paw on top of it.  This 'play' allows me a little time to intercede on the lizards behalf and I put these stressed out little guys into the dog proof area of the garden.  I imagine in time the natural selection process will make two distinctly different subsets of lizards in our yard.  In the dog area will be the fast and wary lizards and in the dog proof area will be the slower but smarter lizards who have chosen to remain in the sanctuary.

Here is Trudy looking slightly guilty about catching lizards.  Or maybe she is off to catch one and is seeing if I am paying attention to her.

Here is Trudy pleading to have her lizard back again.  Or maybe she wants more baby carrots in her pool.

This is a close up of one of the many cucumber vines.  I always seem to go through some sort of gardening amnesia each year and think that in order for us to have enough cucumbers I need to plant a whole bunch of them.  I believe I put in about a dozen plants this year.

This is the female bloom of the cucumber and if it is fertilized...

...it will look like this in about two days.  It has been a great year for cucumbers and practically all the female flowers got fertilized which resulted in a harvest of more than a dozen cucumbers per day when it was at its peak.  It is not possible for two grown humans and two dogs to eat a dozen cucumbers per day and live meaningful lives.  We therefore became the cucumber cornucopia to our friends and family.

Now lest you think we have only vegetable plants in the garden, here is a close up view of the ornamental snail and slug bed along with the only dog in our yard that does not make daily deposits.  I think you are required by law to have garden art of some sort and our beds are infested with it.  The yellow and orange cosmos in the background have been under assault by the snail/slug coalition as well as from the scented geraniums just visible along the right edge of the picture.  I know next to nothing about scented geraniums except that they are the bullies of this garden bed and are trampling all the other plants.  Every time I go to trim them back the scented geraniums entice me with their heavenly smells and I end up leaving them alone.  I told the cosmos they should work on smelling better if they want more room.

Here are some amaryllis that do not obey the laws of this type of bulb.  These are rogue plants - the masters of their fate.  They were forced into bloom last year and then given to me when the blooms died.  I planted them, knowing, according to amaryllis law, they would not bloom for at least another year.  They had other ideas and  bloomed that same year just months after I planted them.  I thought - okay - now they won't bloom again for at least a year.  But here they are, blooming in the spring.  They put all my other amaryllis to shame.  And don't think I don't mention it to the others - those slackers.  The other bulbs just grumble something about these blooming guys being law breakers.

Not everything in the garden is planted in the ground.  Here are a few of the pots of ornamental plants with an orange calibrachoa in the front and nasturtiums and viola in the back.

Here is a closer view of the nasturtiums.  Technically they are edible, but far too pretty to eat.

Here is a closeup of the viola, one of my favorite varieties.  I forget what they are really called - I call them the Monkey faced violas - they look like they belong in the Wizard of Oz.

Here is another of the ornamentals - a scaevola, which I first tried last year.  It is supposedly a perennial but right now just an annual for me until I figure out how to stop killing it.

Here is the best ornamental in our garden, the rare blooming Westhighland White Terrier.  Rare because he is actually rather white in this photo instead of his preferred dirt caked hue.  It isn't all his fault as Trudy is constantly slobbering all over him, but Lewey also likes to roll in 'things' - things being whatever loathsome substance he can find up to and including dead things, bird poop and the Holy Grail of loathsomeness: possum poop.  This is also a rare photo in that Lewey is looking at the camera.  Whenever you try to take a picture of him he usually turns away in disgust. 

That's enough about the garden for now...

The Garden Never Sleeps

Gardening Journal Day 1
We are off to a glorious start and have mapped out where we want the new beds to go.  I have drawn it all out and we will have room for at least 10 or 12 new garden beds along the fence.  Each bed will be about six feet by eight feet.  This should give us plenty of room for all the vegetables we want to grow.  I have also drawn out the exact location of each plant in each garden bed.  This is going to be a great year for gardening!

Gardening Journal Day 2
Okay.  So I forgot to factor in some things like walkways and since we want to install some irrigation lines I have to figure that in as well.  It looks like there will only be room for 10 new garden beds and they will only be six feet by six feet.  But still we should have plenty of room for most of the vegetables we want to grow.  We haven't broken ground yet on the first bed, but I have marked out the first two.  It should go easily and we will be able to plant next week.  This is going to be a great year for gardening!

Gardening Journal Day 5
Just how deep do St Augustine grass roots go?  What is up with all these roots?  I swear if I push that shovel in and hit one more rock I am going to scream.  This soil is all black gumbo mud that is as hard as cement and heavy clay that clings to the shovel.   How can the clay be moist?  Its not like we have had rain in a month. We are still working on the first bed and haven't even dug up half of it yet.  Oh well, I am sure the rest will go smoothly and we will finish both beds by the end of the weekend.  Then next week we can plant!  This is going to be a great year for gardening!

Gardening Journal Day 7
Dear God I am sore in every muscle in my body.  We finally got the first bed dug out are about half way done with the second bed.  We had to remove about a ton and a half of clay.  The topsoil that is left is heavy and compacts easily.  We have had to add a lot of sand... and peat moss.... and compost... and more sand...   Now the bed is almost a foot above the rest of the soil and I am having to move bricks and rocks to buttress the sides.  If all goes well we might be able to plant something in a couple of weeks.  This is going to be a good year for gardening.

Gardening Journal Day 14
I couldn't wait any longer so I planted seeds.  I mapped out six rows in each of the two beds and I have planted onions and carrots and radishes and mustard greens and turnips and parsley.  I can't wait to get started on the next two beds.  This is going to be a great year for gardening.

Gardening Journal Day 24
Why haven't any of the seeds sprouted yet?  I am keeping it all watered, but nothing is coming up. 

Gardening Journal Day 30
I can't figure out if my legs hurt more or my arms. At least the seeds have sprouted.  All of the seeds.  What was I thinking when I planted so many seeds.  Now I need to thin out the seedlings or they won't have room to grow.  We finished another two beds.  Maybe we don't need ten beds.  We will put the tomatoes in next week.

Gardening Journal Day 37
Can't put the tomatoes in.  Temperature below freezing again.  Too cold to go into the garden.

Gardening Journal Day 44
The weather is glorious.  We planted the tomatoes and also some cucumbers.  We cut down all the freeze damaged plants and got all the old garden beds ready.  We are going to start on a couple of new beds next week as well.  I thinned the seedlings.  I can't wait for tomorrow.  I have so much energy.  This is going to be a great year for gardening.

Gardening Journal Day 70
Oh God.  I am so tired.  I just finished staking up the cucumbers.  Again.  They grow almost a foot a day.  The tomatoes are too close together and they are already nearing the tops of the trellis poles.  I forgot about harvesting the radishes and now they are the size of turnips.  I forgot to harvest the turnips too and they are about the size of footballs.  The squash plants are so big I can barely reach through them to get to the squash.  I am harvesting about five or six a day.  I missed one for a few days and it is the size of a club.  No rain so I must water every day.   But at least there are not many mosquitoes.  At least the weather is staying cool.  So very, very tired.

Gardening Journal Day 82
Still no rain.  The garden needs water twice a day now the temperatures are in the 80s and 90s.  The humidity has been so high the squash plants, cantaloupe and cucumbers have developed 'powdery mildew'.  First I sprayed them with fish emulsion.  It was like bringing a knife to a gun fight - no improvement.  Then I used a sulfur spray.  That stopped the powdery mildew but now the cantaloupe are dieing from 'sulfur injury'.  I have given up trying to trellis the tomatoes and am just trying to hold them back off of the other plants.  The cucumbers are producing six or seven a day.  Why did I plant so many?  I have to pick the beans every couple of days.  I have to pick the tomatoes before they get ripe or else the birds will eat them.  So very, very tired.  This is going to be a long year of gardening.


It is day 90 of the 2011 garden and if it seems I am giving this account like a hostage standoff that is because it is starting to feel that way.  We are continuing into our fifth month with virtually no rain.  Even with the lack of rain, mosquitoes, bless their dark evil little hearts, are thriving and I am being bitten on an average of three times per each gardening venture.  Mind you this is me dressed in the full bug-proof regalia of unattractive but functional long gardening pants, a long sleeved over-sized man's dress shirt, thick socks and hat. 

My garden needs me constantly and even though I spend upwards of an hour each day with it on work days and four or five hours a day on weekends, I am falling behind further and further in its upkeep.  The garden never sleeps.

Watermelon Euphoria

Watermelons have always been a big part of my life.  This is actually rather incredible considering that the watermelon season is so short or at least it used to be considered short.  These days one might think that watermelons are in season every month of the year because they can be found in grocery stores.  Another thing that has changed about watermelons is their size.  Today's melons are runts compared to the melons of my youth.  These days there seems to be only the 'icebox' sized varieties.  These might be convenient and fit in the fridge and sometimes they have a good flavor, however, the watermelons of today can't hold a candle to the watermelons of my past.

Black Diamond

Watermelon season used to start sometime in late June.  You might find a few available sooner, but if you were experienced in the ways of the melon you knew there was little likely-hood of these being properly ripe.  The melon trucks would arrive and the melon stands would be set up and it was like the opening of a festival.  Usually their arrival coincided with the first really hot spell of summer.

Our family would be driving along on some other outing when we would spot a stand or truck.  We would pull over and the selection process would begin.  Now it deserves mentioning that the types of watermelon that were offered were nothing like the 'icebox' melons that litter the grocery stores of today.  These melons were so large that either they took up a substantial space in the refrigerator or they were cooled down in long coolers purchased just for such a purpose.

Charleston Gray

As I recall the two main types of watermelon were the Charleston Gray or the green stripe.  Of the two I think we were most partial to the green stripe.  There were other melons but they were less available, such as the famous Black Diamond and sometimes you could find yellow meat watermelons as well.  You never just walked up and picked a melon at random.  First you had to look it over to check for a uniform shape.  The melons in question were usually about two to three feet long oblong shaped with blunt ends.  Either they would be lined up in rows for you to check or they would be piled up in the truck.  Of course we thumped them and when we heard the right resonate sound we would bring the melon over to the proprietor.  Here there was always the ritualistic plugging of the melon which meant the melon seller would cut a triangle into the melon and pull out a chunk so you could see and smell that you had the melon you wanted.  We must have been excellent at selection because I can never remember a single time we rejected a melon.  The ritual was intoxicating though - a scent of the sweet taste to come.  Another thing that has changed in time is that I cannot recall us ever spending more than a dollar for a melon.

Klondike Stripe

 Once we had our prize it was a case of delayed gratification.  The melon must be chilled and that would take all day with the melon sitting in an ice chest filled with crushed ice.  By evening though it would be ready and so would we.  After dinner my father would slice the melon in half and then into four pieces.  My sister and I would each get a piece about a foot and a half long and at least a foot wide.  We used spoons and always started at the uncut rear area so as to preserve the cut end as a sort of retaining wall for all the wonderful juice.

It was heavenly and we ate as much as possible, usually making quite an impressive dent in our watermelon boats.  Of course there were seeds and we were allowed to spit them out as long as we didn't spit them on the table, floor or each other.  Usually our first foray would not complete the melon quarter, so we would cover it with foil and put it in the refrigerator for the next day.  Our method meant we would have the best part near the heart remaining for us when we came back to our share.

If we were eating watermelon outside then the melon was divided into just four pieces giving us a length nearly two feet long.  When we were outside the abundance of seeds usually led to watermelon seed spitting contests.  It was unheard of to have an outdoor event, picnic or family gathering in the summer without several watermelons on hand.  My father and my uncles seemed to have a competition on who could arrive with the largest watermelon at our family Forth of July celebrations at my grandmother's beach house.

At the beach house gatherings the watermelon seed spitting contest was an annual event and we all competed.  This was no informal affair.  We had rules, a competition area and several seed judges.  Two competitors would line up and do their best to spit a single seed as far as possible.  The victor would then go on to challenge the next competitor.  My grandmother was the odds on favorite having vanquished my other family members with her seed spitting prowess.  She didn't win my small margins either.  Her seeds flew at least a yard farther.  She said this was due to her robust health.  My aunt said it was because she used to shout at them as kids.

I was the last challenger one year.  She had been unstoppable and they actually had to lengthen the competition area just to keep up with her shots.  As I stepped up to the spit line with her I had a couple of seeds in my mouth trying to decide which one would go the farthest.  I positioned the seed I wanted to use in the center of my tongue and held the other one between my cheek and gum.  We stepped up to the mark and took our places.  My aunt held up a flag and counted us down.  "On your mark, get set, SPIT!"  I used my best technique and spit with all my might and amazingly my seed flew past hers.  There was instant celebration not the least of which was from my grandmother and I was awarded the prize.  Another piece of watermelon.  I accepted the prize but secretly I was a little mortified.  In my zest to out-spit my grandmother I had accidentally spit the second seed as well which was clearly a violation but I dug into my prize melon piece with only a tiny sense of guilt.

This summer I vow to search out the true melon.  I will not stop until I find a Charleston Gray or Green Stripe.  I will buy the cooler and the ice and when that melon is cold I will slice off a huge quarter for my husband and myself.  Then we will see who can spit seeds the farthest.  And if he doesn't watch out I might just use two seeds.

Gardening Deja Vu

It starts out every year as a growing desire.  Sometime as the weather switches from hot, humid and oppressive to cold, humid and oppressive, sometimes overnight, a hunger begins that can only be quenched by putting plants and seeds into soil.

What is most amazing about this is that mere weeks before the gardening hunger begins I have totally sworn off gardening and have decided to just let everything die from the heat, mosquitoes and drought that the endless summer foists upon us each year.  Yet every year there is this revival.

It all starts out great too.  Usually by the time I am psychologically recovered from the summer, winter is in full swing, which around here means I have to put on a sweatshirt over my t-shirt.  Sometimes is gets cold enough that I have to strategically layer much of the clothing that I own in order to keep warm - and that is while I am in the house.  Living in an area where heat is much more prevalent than cold means one never develops much cold tolerance.  Either that or the humidity makes it seem much colder than it is.  They have a wind chill factor but what they really ought to have is a humidity chill factor.

Anyway, while I am all cold and everything I usually settle down with my gardening books and plan the ultimate garden.  Sometimes this means building new garden beds.  This year I was in heaven because we removed an old hedge which opened up the space for seven more garden beds in addition to the three we already used.  Of course what that meant in an all too real way is that we had to break the ground for seven more garden beds.

And these were not small beds either.  These were six foot by six foot plots.  For those of you who do not suffer from gardening, let me explain.  To create a new bed you must first dig down into the rock hard, never before turned earth.  We don't skimp on this either - we dig down at least three feet.  This means digging through roots and more roots before finally reaching a morass of clay.  We remove the clay which of course is the heaviest dirt possible.  Placing the clay aside to do God knows what with we then put back what soil is left.

Now of course this leaves us with a six foot by six foot hole.  Not to worry because you don't just plop the plants into regular dirt, you have to 'amend the soil' which is just a fancy way of saying you have to put other kinds of dirt and 'things' into your dirt to make your plants happy.  So we add in peat moss and sand and compost.  Each of these amendments means you have to turn the soil again.  And then again because you want it to be thoroughly mixed.  And then again because, well just because.  This is very difficult to do by yourself and in some ways equally difficult to do with another person, especially one who keeps pointing out places that you have missed and pointing out roots that need to be pulled out... and pointing out clay that needs to come out... and pointing out weeds that need to come out until you are seriously considering amending the soil with your significant other.

Now you say, with all that work done, now you can plant.  Well no.  Since you added all that amendment you now have a six by six foot raised bed that has to be buttressed with bricks or rocks or wood - but not just any wood don'cha know because treated lumber can leach all sorts of nasty toxins into the soil, so you have to use expensive wood like redwood or ceder.  So now you have a raised bed that is six foot by six foot and filled with a wonderful mixture of amendments.  And then you wait two weeks.  You don't plant immediately because you want the earth to sort of settle a bit and anything that might be 'in there' to decompose and settle down or else, God Forbid, your plants will act all puny or something.  Multiply all the above by seven and you will understand why my husband and I often move around like we are geriatric ex-football players at certain times of the year.

Finally you get to plant something. What you plant depends on when you finally get done with all your bed excavation stuff.  We finished our first two beds in time to plant a winter garden filled with turnips, spinach, radishes, carrots, parsley, cilantro, mustard greens, lettuce and onions.  This means we put a whole lot of seeds down and then... nothing happened.  Water it and nothing still happens until finally when you are again reading the labels on the plant seeds to see what you have done wrong you see your first sprouts. This always makes me feel powerful.  "Look!" I point out to my husband, "The SEEDS are sprouting!"  He has been with me long enough to know that he has to acknowledge this with a "That's great!" instead of what he truly thinking which is "Great.  Weeks of backbreaking labor and I'm supposed to get excited about some bits of green.  How does she know those aren't weeds?"  And they could be weeds, but I am willing to celebrate anything green at that stage.

Now a six by six foot expanse would seem to be capable of holding a lot of garden plants, but not really.  Plants don't just need soil, they need space.  I typically ignore the spacing directions on the seed packets which means my beds are soon overgrown with plants.  After the 'seeds are sprouting' excitement comes the uncomfortable time of reckoning - thinning the seedlings.   I know the gardening books and magazines all say things like 'You can use the thinned plants in salads', etc, but that does little to assuage my guilt.  After all I planted the seeds and they valiantly came up and now I am depriving them of their God given right to grow and live happy little plant lives.  I usually am over this particular guilt phase after about the third week and I can pull up plants with wild abandon.

Now my husband's gardening obsession, besides getting the soil 'just right' is putting in the warm weather plants as soon as possible.  He wants to plant tomatoes in February which if we did we would be looking out at tomato-cicles especially this year when we had several weeks in the 20's.  What we end up with is several plants living in the house with us.  We give them their own light and all, but they are grumpy because they know just outside that door is a completely inappropriate season for them.  Every time I walk by them the seem to glare at me and shiver just a little bit.

My husband is great at spacing plants but he has to contend with me.  He put three tomatoes into one of the six by six foot beds and I was all "But they are too far apart and I can't put anything else in there," and then I groused about having only four more beds, plus the other three beds we already had.  "Barely enough," I moaned.  Later in the season when the three tomato plants are cramped and  competing with each other because they are actually too close together he will give me a knowing look.  "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I will mutter.

That is where we currently are right now.  All the new garden beds are planted as well as the old beds and we are very overgrown but it all looks marvelous and it is all producing such copious amounts we are the cornucopia of vegetable product to our family and friends.  That is all about to change because although it has been a truly great spring following a colder than normal winter, the bugs are about to begin a steady war of attrition.

Already we have some sort of fungus on the squash caused by all the humidity and oddly enough the lack of rain.  I have begun to fight it with what is recommended in the organic guides.  They suggest wetting down the leaves with liquid seaweed or diluted milk(?), or diluted urine(?!?) to help combat the problem.  We have fish emulsion which I reasoned was just one step up from seaweed so I have used that.  It sort of works, but I know these plants are doomed.  I might be able to prolong their miserable lives but they will never be the way they were just a few weeks ago.

I picked a couple of tomato horned caterpillars off of the tomatoes but those are more of a mild nuisance.   What I really dread will happen in the next few days, heck it is probably happening as I type.  The stink bugs.  These are not actually stink bugs but are what are called leaf footed bugs, however, they stink when you crush them so who cares about their leafy feet.  Once they start I will be in an all out war that I will gradually lose.  I use a 'hand picking' method which means I grab them with my gloved hands or knock them off into a bucket and then stomp on them.  The first couple of times I am stricken with guilt, but very shortly I become the bug huntress and it is all out war.

Along with the garden eating bugs will come the droves of mosquitoes so that every foray into the garden means I will have to suit up with long sleeves, long pants, mosquito netting and spray it all with mosquito repellent.  Even doing this I will average about a half dozen bites per gardening episode.  I am just so delectable to them they will teleport through the layers of clothing and bug spray to get some of me.

It is about that time that the joy of gardening becomes the desperation of gardening.  I am owned by the garden and it transmits its needs at me constantly.  It needs water; it needs weeding; it needs harvesting; it needs trellising.  If I miss any of those things I feel guilt... until August.  August is both a hell on earth, but also a reprieve.  No longer does anything I do in the garden matter.  It is all going to bake to death by the relentless power of Mega-Summer.  No plant can set fruit and in fact most plants just give up and die.  Those few that hang on look at me with pleading leaves, "Kill me," they whisper in dry choked voices, "Killll meee," they beg.

I flee the garden not to return until the weather breaks.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Seasons

When I was a child I was taught there were four seasons which were formally introduced as Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.  Spring was always depicted as having birds and flowers and beginning in April.  Summer had a bright sun and started in July.  Fall showed colorful leaves swirling in a breeze and began in September.  Winter showed snowflakes and started in December.  It was all very colorful, precise and very wrong.

Living on the gulf coast of Texas for most of my life has given me a different perspective of seasons.  This thing called Spring.  I guess you could say we get that, but it typically occurs sometime in late February or early March.  There will be very nice sunny days and temperatures in the 60s and 70s with the nights dipping down into the 50s.  It is grand and usually causes me no end of gardening fervor.  Life is great, I have boundless energy and many, many projects get accomplished.  There are no mosquitoes, no bugs and every day is a joy.  This lasts approximately two weeks or less.

Then comes April, which begins to behave in a very bipolar way.  Some days it is springlike and others have highs in the 90s with 90 percent humidity.  Often in April there will begin a series of torrential rains that continue into May.  These rains will make the ground a bog and cause two different reactions in the garden.  Reaction one is that certain plants will grow like mad and escape any restraints or trellis.  They cannot be brought under control because to do that I would have to wade into a quagmire to get to them.  Reaction two is that the plant drowns.  There is nothing I can do for them so I usually end up standing by their corpses and apologizing for having put them in a swamp.

With all the torrential rains come the mosquitoes and an oppressive humidity that makes me fear I will contract either a mosquito born illness or parts of my skin will begin to rot from the constant moisture.  From May into June there is a sense of dread that becomes stronger and stronger.  Even if there is a rare day where the temperatures are reasonable I cannot enjoy it.  Summer is taking over.  Every year I go through the stages of grief about it.  Denial - "It is still Spring.  It isn't that hot yet and perhaps this year it won't get too hot."  Anger - "Why in the hell do I have to live in this God forsaken part of the world where the Spring is so short and the Summers try and kill me?"  Bargaining - "Just let there be one more week of reasonable weather, just one more week and I will do every house repair and garden improvement known to mankind."  Depression - "This will be the year the summer kills me.  Why bother even getting out of bed.  Spring is over and there is nothing but relentless heat and humidity for the rest of my life."  Acceptance - well, I actually never seem to reach this stage, I just cycle back through the other stages.

Once Summer begins it takes a choke hold and lasts well into September and often into October.  Hell, it may not give up.  There can be 90 degree weather in December.  Summer daytime temperatures can remain in the high 90s to 100s but the worst is that the night time temperatures will stay in the 80s.  No, let me correct that.  The worst is that the humidity stays at 80 percent or higher.  There is no adult human that can endure this kind of torment for very long.  For example, I know that the Native American people that lived along the Gulf coast, the Karankawas, were purported to be cannibals.  That's what the heat, humidity and mosquitoes can drive you to do.  Thank God for air conditioning.  Even with the AC, indoor temperatures usually stay close to 80 in my house.  I become an indoor creature as opposed to the sun as any nocturnal animal.  Sleep becomes a challenge due to the necessity of having several fans blowing on me at all times.  The fans make it bearable but a combination of fan and AC can actually make it too cold which will cause me to pull up a sheet.  This will then make it too hot so I will kick off the sheet.  So sleep in the summer becomes much more athletic.

Then comes August.  It deserves its own separate season designation so I am crowning it Mega-Summer.  Take everything that is bad about summer, notch it up by about 20 degrees and then let it go on and on and on.  I swear that there is some time distortion in August that gives it far more than its 31 allotted days.  Forget about the garden.  Every year at the start of Spring, in some sort of amnesic delusion, I vow to continue to garden throughout the summer.  I will water every day.  I will tend the plants.  Every year I give up completely in August.  Why bother watering when the air temperature actually cooks the plants as they stand.

As far as Fall is concerned I am not sure I have ever experienced it.  Supposedly, I have read and seen on TV, there is this time where the temperatures cool off, the leaves on the trees change color and people ride hay wagons.  Not here.  Yes, occasionally we will have a few days where the oppressive Mega-Summer heat ceases and I will emerge from the dim recesses of my AC environment to blink like a cave creature dazzled by the sun.  Usually though we go from one extreme to the other with a temperature drop of over 40 degrees in a single day.  Forget about the leaves changing colors, they just fall off the tree in blackened clumps.

We do have Winter, but it doesn't usually arrive on time.  I think I look forward to winter the most so that I can wear my winter wardrobe which consists mostly of shirts with long sleeves.  These clothes are so seldom worn that they last for years and years.  Once Winter decides to get here it is not as cold as some places, but it manages to combine some of the most uncomfortable seasonal characteristics without any charm.  Snow is something we might have every decade or two but we do have cold rain, bitter winds, high humidity and mud.  When it does drop below freezing - good luck traveling on any of the roads.  There will be ice on bridges and overpasses and a tremendous number of drivers completely out of their element merrily slamming into one another.  Even if the city wanted to sand all the roadways it is not like they have the equipment necessary to deal with the hundreds of miles of city streets. 

Sometimes I fantasize about living where there are four seasons, where everything happens by the book in proper order.  Until then I will just have to keep enduring Short-Spring, Summer, Mega-Summer, Virtually Non-existent Fall and Winter.