Well for this one time, practicality won out. By growing vegetables, we provide food for ourselves, and with food growing here free, I can save money on groceries by cultivating the vegetables.
Now, I have to stop here and tell you I have in the past done my fair share of vegetable gardening, when my first set of kids was young and I had lots more energy for hoeing, and weeding, and staking and all the daily care needed by vegetables.
As I got older and more ADD-involved, I found that I was less inclined to remember the vegetables way out in the back of the yard. My husband was the one more involved in that process. I was focused more on getting the yard to look just right, like those pictures you see of the beautiful gardens. I always thought if I had one of those beautiful looking gardens, then I would feel more complete, better about my life, etc. The ever elusive dream........
And you all know how that goes. Sure I got my great looking gardens, but along the way I lost part of myself in the quest. What a relief to have gotten past that and to have found me, once and for all!!!
So I did tackle the vegetables and fruits. This is what it looked like when we got back. The weeds were so dense I couldn't even walk through the area. You can see one of the watermelon vines growing up the Yucca stem!
I went to the tomatoes first as they were in pretty tough shape. The watermelon vines were growing all over the tomato plants, with several creeping up and over and around wherever they could. So I worked on tracing the ends of the vines back to see where they started.
This was the area of the very large watermelon, that we are treating ever so carefully and complimenting it constantly on how beautiful it is looking these days. I could barely see it with all the vines all over the place.
As there were just so many vines growing I decided to cut back the ones that had not produced any melon yet, to allow the plants to concentrate on those melons that were already growing. This late in the season any new melon will not have long enough to ripen before the frost sets in. Here is the wonderful watermelon freed from all the excess vines.
I was working away, with about a dozen vines growing every which way, and was really making progress. I was actually able to get in between the tomato plants to stake them up and harvest the ripening tomatoes that were waiting for us.
I was so intent on what I was doing that I had not noticed a lone developing melon that was tucked away hiding among the tomato plants. So, that's right, you probably guessed it. I had cut it's vine, not realizing it belonged to a melon until I started to pull the excess vines out of the area, and lo and behold, there was a melon, on the end of a cut vine!!!
Oh, no, I did it again, another OOPS moment!! As it had several leave bracts along the still attached vine, I carefully carried it in to the house and put it gently on the counter with it's cut vine in a cup of water. As it was pretty good sized, I figured I had nothing to lose by keeping the vine watered.
So that was early last week and now here it is a week later, in it's own little corner of the sunroom, cushioned by one of our pillows, basking in the sunlight coming in the window, and the vine is still alive, the leaves rich and green, still hanging in there. It'll be interesting to see how it progresses, or not, we'll see.
The raspberry patch was so overgrown with all the tomatoes that were planted there (LOL!!). And this is what it looked like, more of a tropical rain forest than a suburban raspberry patch!
Now they say that turn around is fair play, so I should have made my husband clean out all the weeds. If I had been able to thin out the other berries, I would have mulched it all as I went along, as I had done with the other area I had thinned. Then there would not have been so much room for weeds.
As it was, I spent several hours and pulled out bucket after bucket of weeds, mostly creeping Charlie (Asian Dayflower).
I even found a parsnip gone to seed , which is great as I can start new plants for next year!
This is the cleared out area of the raspberry patch where watermelon is also growing.
And these are the watermelon in the other melon patch that are also doing just great. I'm sure all the rain this year has been an added bonus for them. Someone recently gave me the tip to put the melons on a wood shingle to keep them from rotting.
I have googled it, but am still not sure how to know when to pick them. Any help out there??
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