Aliens & Softballs

Autumn is coming. Leaves are turning red, grass is turning yellow, and my green thumb is growing pale. With a season of gardening behind me, I'm not sure I've come out wiser. If anything, I've only been able to laugh at my attempts to aid in our family's food storage.

On Tuesday I spent a couple hours ripping out half the garden. I filled the big, black garbage pail thing with corn stalk, green bean plants, carrot tops, and nastified, bug-ridden what-used-to-be-watermelons. It's a nasty job, but, hey, someone has to do it. Among all the ripping out, I grabbed a little produce.

Here are half my carrots (the other half are still in the ground). You probably can't tell, but most of them are only about 3 inches long, followed by a long, stringy tail. This is beacuse I didn't till the ground deep enough so the carrots couldn't grow. If you use your imagination on the bottom row, right side, you can picture little eyes on the carrots and the whipsy tail, and see little aliens. (well, maybe normal people can't see them; only "special" people like me)

And here are my two watermelons which didn't get devoured by grasshoppers and who-knows-what-else. The bigger one was the size of a softball, and the other one was smaller than a tennis ball. They were both yummy-looking inside and very sweet, but the texture wasn't what I had hoped. We didn't eat more than a bite.
The one thing I ignored this year was my poor strawberry patch. It looks nice from a distance but is overgrown, infested with snails, and yielded about 2 strawberries this year (both of which were eaten by snails). I suppose the strawberry patch will be my added project in the Spring.

This year I planted the following things: corn, green beans, watemelon, carrots, rhubarb, butternut squash, zucchini, cucumber, tomato. (I will only be planting the bolded veggies next year.)

I guess you could sum up my garden the way a hot Mormon boy sums up a not-so-hot Mormon girl: my garden veggies have "such sweet spirits."