Garden Clean Up

As I told you yesterday, I dug up Emily's potatoes (much larger than mine and only two had a grub-eaten path), picked the rest of the onions, and mowed off parts of the garden. Personally, I think it looks much cleaner and less overwhelming. Now, before you get all concerned that I'm mowing off huge portions of my garden in some manic, bi-polar, psychotic break, I only mowed down the black beans. And part of the strawberries (which are already growing back). I had good reason, too, so don't you judge me.

I now have several watermelons in the patch. I don't know how they keep large watermelon patches weeded because the vines latch on to everything. Oh, Art tells me they use herbicides on genetically modified watermelons and that's how they keep the weeds out. Huh. Anyway, there are a couple that are really good sized so I thumped one (like I do at the store even though I have no idea what I'm doing) and it sounded like a ripe one (again, I really had no idea) so I took it inside and cut it open. Sadly my finger thumping is not at all accurate as the melon was not fully ripe. I took the two halves to the barn and let the chickens eat it; they did a pretty good job cleaning out the melon, too. I'll wait another couple of weeks before I try again. For the life of me I can't remember where I bought the seeds (some catalogue or another) nor can I remember what variety I planted. I remember that it's a smaller, very sweet watermelon, but I don't know how to tell if it's ripe. If you know, please tell me!

(P.S. This picture keeps loading wrong- I've done it three times and it keeps flipping it. I don't have time to keep trying as it takes twenty minutes to load one picture, so just tilt your head to the right.)