It’s hard to commit to a post lately. You know, the distractions… like chilled wine and porch swing kind of distractions. Summer time. It’s a real struggle.
But yesterday when I got home from work, I grabbed a glass of wine, skipped the porch swing, and wandered around the yard dodging chicken poop and admiring the growth of some of the plants and trees.
First I stopped by the sunflowers to see how they were doing. They’re just now on the edge of exploding all over the place as I like to describe it. About one more week and they’ll be in their full glory. The bees love them. I love them.
Then I took a look at my fig plant growing beside them… Figs!
The other fig plant also has figs. They’re just not so big yet. At first I assumed it just wasn’t going to grow any this year. But I was a dumb-ass for assuming. For some reason it just didn’t occur to me that two different varieties might not ripen at the same time. Duh.
Speaking of chickens, the first bunch of chicks that hatched this spring will be “ripe” for the oven in September. They already ditched their mother – gave her “the finger” and left. Just like any normal, disrespectful teenage chicken these days would.
Next, I visited the squash I planted. I bought a squash last year from an Amish lady down the road. She told me it was a Hubbard Squash. Which I doubted it was, but didn’t argue. I wanted it for a Halloween decoration. It looked like a gnarly, green zombie pumpkin. After Halloween I kept it on the table to remind me to watch The Walking Dead on Sundays. Come spring, it was still there on the table…
That’s when I decided I’d better cut my zombie-pumpkin open and collect seeds if I wanted to grow my own little zombies. I admit, I was a little afraid to cut it open. Would it be rotten? Full of worms? To my surprise, it was a beautiful orange color inside and smelled like cantaloupe. But it tasted just like butternut squash, not cantaloupe (or rotten zombies).
I was shocked that it never showed any signs of spoiling. It looked exactly the same as the day I bought it last October. Now it looks like I might be growing a few of my own this year. Whatever they are…
Last, I stopped and admired the apples while I swigged down my last gulp of wine and scraped chicken shit from the bottom my flip-flop.
There are only a handful or so of apples but they look nice. This is the first of my apple trees to grow apples. So to me, of course, they’re perfect. ~A