You may have noticed a motif these last few posts. Green tomatoes here, ripening in a box. A melon there, hanging on for dear life. You haven't even seen my work in progress: A paean to my last batch of baba ganouj, made from my last tiny eggplant of the year. You'll probably never see that post, in fact, as I ate the evidence before I could snap a photo. You may sense I'm struggling to let go of garden season, to which I say, you read me like a book. All that confessed, I promised a few posts ago to keep you up to date on the late melon that sprang forth, unexpectedly, one morning in October -- from a plant that had sprung forth, unexpectedly, from the vermicompost we'd combined with our soil back in early June.
I was trying to give this petite amor every fighting chance, but I eventually had to acknowledge: The nights were getting colder, the leaves were getting crisper, and growth seemed to have stopped at the size of a baseball (shown above, beside a set of keys for perspective). So this past Saturday, I reluctantly harvested. My heart broke to pieces as I plucked her from her viny stem, then pulled that stem from the roots and popped it into a yard-waste bag.
And now for the moment of truth:
There, in all their O'Keefish glory, are the inner chambers of our final melon of the season. Ripe! Ok, the seeds outpace the fruit by probably 3 to 1, but there's dessert in there somewhere: a theory I intend to test this afternoon at lunch.Farewell, garden season of 2010. You exceeded, you nourished, and through it all, you surprised. Hard to ask more of a garden than that.
2 comments:
Hey, how was it?
It was ok. Had to struggle to wrench out that little layer of fruit, but it was nice and sweet. I'll take it for a freebie :-).
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