Watermelon is usually pretty good on its own, I think.
Andrew, on the other hand, doesn't ever think watermelon is good.
Everyone else in our family enjoys watermelon, though, so in the summer Andrew will often pick up a watermelon when he does the grocery shopping (because he does the grocery shopping at our house). He won't typically cut it (though he has on occasion), but he will buy it for us.
I have never succeeded in growing one, though we had some butternut squash volunteer in our yard this year (from the one time Andrew made butternut squash soup, I guess) and it is going wild. Well, the vines are, anyway. We've got a couple of lovely butternut squashes developing, but that's all.
That's probably sufficient, really, because we honestly don't eat butternut squash all that often. Andrew can be touchy about squashes (that's a link to the story about Andrew thinking some pumpkin soup I made was tomato soup...and it was soon after that experience that he sought out a butternut squash to make a butternut squash soup, which surprised everyone because seeking out squash is somewhat out of character for Andrew...but the soup was delicious and now I have butternut squash tendrils taking over my yard thanks to the half-baked compost I used when I prepared my garden beds this spring).
Anyway, all that is to say that most everyone in the house enjoys watermelon and tonight we had watermelon with dinner.
We'd eaten half of it the other day and the other half was sitting in the fridge waiting to be eaten. Honestly, I prefer my melons...warm. Not, like, warm warm, but, like...room temperature warm...or fresh-off-the-vine warm. I don't prefer refrigerator-temperature melon (this is true for all melons, not just watermelon). But this watermelon had been waiting in the fridge, so it was nicely chilled (which meant that it wasn't as appealing to me).
I decided I'd make a little zesty watermelon salad out of it instead of serving it plain (because that would be more appealing to me). When we had dinner with the Zanders last summer they served a zesty watermelon salad (not its actual name) and it was really good! They chopped up watermelon, added lemon juice (maybe?) and some extra sugar (blah) and some fresh mint from their garden. It was delicious.
So I asked the kids to gather some mint leaves. Our mint (which is in a container...because mint) hasn't actually been doing very well so they weren't able to gather much, but they were able to gather enough. We supplemented with some fresh basil leaves, which the kids gathered from our little herb garden. Basil and mint are in the same family and I think basil tastes somewhat minty when it's fresh.
We shredded the mint and basil in with the chilled watermelon (added no sugar) and sprinkled it with lemon and lime juice (because Zoë and Alexander couldn't decide which they wanted). And that was our salad.
It was delicious and refreshing.
And the whole point in telling you all of this was that while getting the mint leaves was fine, Zoë needed help being brave enough to get at the basil (which is actually just to the left of the frame in the picture above...just past all those weeds...anyway...) because there were too many bees in the garden.
Or wasps.
Or something.
I reminded her that such creatures are typically after nectar, not little girls.
"Evelyn said that wasps aren't pollinators," Alexander told me.
I do not understand the hold Evelyn has on Alexander. Everything that child utters is sacrosanct in his mind. Evelyn this... Evelyn that... Evelyn is wonderful...but Evelyn is literally 8 years old...and is a phenomenal story teller. I mean, she weaves a good yarn, I really gotta hand it to her.
"Evelyn is wrong about wasps," I told him. "Wasps are definitely pollinators."
Angry little pollinators, but pollinators nonetheless.
"Yeah, that's what I thought, too," he told me...as if I were wrong about this. "But then Evelyn told me that only bees pollinate and wasps are good for nothing."
"No, buddy. Wasps are pollinators, too, and they don't typically bother you if you don't bother them."
"Exactly like that. Now, why don't you head up to the garden with Zoë—you two know where the basil plants are, right? On the top, across from the green box? Great. Head on up there to get some basil and don't mind the wasps. They'll leave you alone if you leave them alone."
And so it was that I finally got some basil for our salad.
But our garden is rather a bustling place to be! We get all sorts of bees and wasps visiting our garden.
Here's a bee on a purple blazing star:
And another bee on our milkweed (which I did not realize grew as tall as it does; as tall as me):
Here's a different kind of bee on a zinnia:
And another bee on another zinnia:
And here are some bees on my sunflowers:
And here's a tired ol' bumblebee on a tired ol' zinnia:
We have bees (and wasps and butterflies) buzzing around our garden all day. When night falls we sometimes have bees who come to spend the night, nestling down on pollen-stuffed pillows, velvety sheets as soft as petals. It's rather sweet.
Here's one of my sunflowers gazing at the moon:
I was so happy my sunflowers made it this year! We've tried in the past, but the deer have always come by and mowed them down. This year, though, I had them behind a fence and was rather vigilant about spraying (a non-toxic, garlic-based deer repellant...it is stinky...but it seems to keep the deer at bay). Still, we've had a few casualties.
A few short little guys were munched on while we were away at the beach in May (the deer must have just come and grazed over the fence). Many of those munched-on stems surprised me by continuing to grow, sometimes splitting off into multiple heads.
My sunflowers have seen so...despondent...in the past, so...willing to throw in the towel—one little munch and they were done for!
But not these sunflowers. They are much heartier than I expected them to be!
True, true—several of them wilted hopelessly in the blazing heat we're experiencing, just snapped right in half. I brought a couple heads from the fallen sunflowers inside and put them in my fanciest vase to perk up our dinner table:
Others I just left in the garden to...decompose...at their leisure. Like, check out this guy:
That stalk is at a 90° angle! I thought this sunflower was done for...but I just left it...because that's kind of my attitude about gardening.
Rachel once described my garden as—I kid you not—a "bird poop" garden.
Like, some gardeners meticulously plan things out (I guess), but my garden is much more haphazard than that. It's more like what might happen if a bunch of birds pooped out seeds in the garden and whatever manages to germinate is what we're getting...
And she's not wrong.
Like, I have ideas sometimes. And I plant things on purpose.
But most of what grows is only growing because it wants to. My garden is full of volunteers (from my compost) and plants neighbours have given to me when they thin their yards. I take everything and anything (well, almost anything (I do try to put in native plants as I can)) and if it grows, I figure it was meant to be. If it doesn't grow...I'm not heartbroken because if it can't withstand the level of neglect with which I tend my garden, then...that's on it.
(To be fair, I did water my poor garden after church this afternoon; it was so wilty...so I just turned on the hose and soaked the soil for it and everything perked right back up (it has been so dry this summer)).
Anyway, this sunflower bent over at 90° and was resting on the fence. I was a little sad about it because there had been a lovely sunflower head developing on it and now it was just going to die. But, of course, I couldn't bring myself to uproot it.
That's work.
And it was hot.
And it's possible some caterpillar would still want to munch its leaves or something.
So imagine my surprise when I noticed that it had continued to grow up towards the sun...
It's about a foot taller than the fence now and it looks like I'm going to get to see that head bloom after all! It's a tall sunflower. These garden boxes are 8'x4'. And the fencing is like three feet tall or something. So this sunflower is three feet tall, plus three feet across, plus another foot or so—that's a good seven feet tall, technically speaking. There's another sunflower in my garden that has not fallen over and is a good seven or eight feet tall; we're still waiting for it to bloom as well.
(And I know that plot is awfully bare. We had peas in there, but they all died. And I meant to replace them with, like, tomatoes or something. But I didn't get around to planting them in June and...now it's the middle of July...so we'll probably just focus on getting that plot ready for a fall planting of...carrots and kale...and things).
Perhaps I'll have the kids help me measure the sunflowers tomorrow, just for curiosity's sake....
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