Puteri’s Musings 2

This time last year, we were just about to start our garden. We had a good harvest of cantaloupes, water melon, zucchini and corn. In fact the water-melon started bearing more fruit after we had harvested the first round of fruit. The weather got too cold and only a few of the fruit ripened in time. The rest withered on the vine.

This summer, I and the kids will be in Malaysia, and the garden patch is not ready for any gardening. But I hope Doug will plant at least some water-melons because those take a few months to grow and ripen and hopefully by the time we get back from Malaysia in mid-August, there will be water-melons ready for harvest.

Right now I can’t think about starting the garden because I have a few quilts that I have to finish and one of them is something I had promised my sister-in-law. I promised her that this time I will return home to Malaysia with a quilt for her.

I’ll be sorry to miss the gladiolas in bloom this year though. We left the bulbs in the ground all winter, and this spring there were a lot more plants coming out of the ground. I must remind Doug to take a few pictures of the gladiolas when they bloom.

So how is your gardening coming along this year?

I love to see how well my morning glory plants are doing! I wished we had planted them earlier but we couldn’t because we have 12 geese running loose in our yard and any young plants would not have survived. We waited till we had fenced off an area in front of our patio before we started planting anything.

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One thing about being new at gardening is that there are a lot of things that one doesn’t know. For example, how do you tell if a water melon is ripe and is ready for picking?

I have been patting the three water melons in my garden, and every day I say that they are ready for picking. I am not sure, but by patting the water melon and listening to the sound, one is supposed to know if the water melon is ripe or not. My mother told me that a hollow sound means it is ripe whereas a heavy and dull thumping sound means that it is not ripe yet.

If the sound produced by the patting, as told by my mother, is anything to go by, I guess the three water melons in my garden are ready for picking. I don’t want over-ripe water melons on my hands! We can’t eat them fast enough!

We also planted a straight neck squash. We did not know that you are supposed to harvest them when they are still quite small, about the size of my skinny forearms. We let them grow so large thinking that the bigger the better! But Kathy, my friend, said the squash is not supposed to grow very big. The flavor of the squash changes as it ages.

Ok, next year we know better, if we plant more squash!

Update:

Doug googled “water melon ripeness” and came up with the following result. It seems I got the ripeness sound all wrong! Goes to show how much I know about water melons!

Watermelons give you several clues as to when to harvest. Observe the tendril, a small curly stem (pigtail) on the watermelon vine directly opposite the point where the melon is attached to the vine. When the melon ripens, this tendril dries and turns brown or gray. The melon also develops a “soil spot” where the melon sits on the soil, unless you periodically turn the melon. Don’t turn the melon, because you want to use this soil spot to determine ripeness in the melon. When the melon is immature, the spot is greenish or white. As the melon ripens the spot develops a cream or yellowish color. This indicates ripeness. Thumping the melon to determine ripeness is difficult. However, people with a musician’s ear may wish to choose their watermelon by thumping it. A dull thud sound indicates ripeness, or perhaps over-ripeness. A ringing sound heard when the melon is thumped indicates an unripe melon.

Source: New Mexico University website