Here goes my Almost Annual August Agricultural Angst column on whatever garden problem I had this year, with a nice little moral attached.
My garden problem this year involved cucumbers errr, cantaloupe.
I have been loath to plant cantaloupe because even though my husband and I love them, they have always been very hard to raise for us, frequently rotting in the millisecond between when they are not ripe enough and then boom, suddenly they are overripe and rotten and sprouting a nice colony of ants.
So my mind-set, when I saw vines growing nicely in the garden back in June was: hmm, those must be my cucumbers. I was happy to see nice little cucumbers sprouting on the vinealthough they were kind of round and fat. Hmm. I mused that they must be a new variety of cucumbers that my daughter talked me into buying from the always-interesting seed catalog. I decided to try a small round sample. I carefully peeled, tasted, and then salted it to see if it would taste better. OK, a little different and less tasty, but definitely could pass for a cucumber.
I went away for a week, leaving my 25-year-old daughter tending the garden. Since the cucumbers were growing, she picked several and put them in the refrigerator so they wouldnt spoil, and took several to her workplace to give away. She told her coworkers they looked a little different but seemed to taste OK.
My husband kept insisting they were little cantaloupes but Doreen argued they had to be cucumbers because we didnt plant any cantaloupe and they certainly werent volunteers in that part of the garden. I started to think that maybe they were volunteer cantaloupes, from seed carried by a bird or two.
We have tried to keep a garden diary the last couple years so eventually, to her credit, Doreen decided to look on our planting calendar. Oh. Yes. We HAD planted cantaloupe there, and then finally we vaguely recalled that in looking through the seed catalog, Doreen had said, Why dont we try raising cantaloupe this year since you guys like them so much. And there it was in blue and white in our diary: Planted two hills cantaloupe. End of question.
The best part came when she alerted her coworkers that the cucumbers she gave them probably werent very good. Oh, they were fine! came the report, and Doreen couldnt bear to tell them they had just eaten very unripe cantaloupe.
Moral? Never trust the freebie food that your coworkers bring to share at the office.
Just kidding. Its actually this: Sometimes things arent what they look like. After some 35 years of gardening, I certainly thought I knew my cucumbers from my cantaloupes. When I shared my dilemma on Facebook, my friends tried to guess what we had eaten from the garden that was round and small and looked a little like a cucumber but wasnt. They came up with an amazing variety of possibilities, guessing watermelon, kohlrabi, rutabaga, lemon cukes, cactus and seaweed. And we all had a good laugh.
Sometimes a duck isnt a duck. Sometimes when you see someone get out of a car which is parked in a handicapped space and have no obvious disability, maybe they have a heart condition and try to limit walking. When you pass someone on the highway and it seems like they speed up and it makes your blood pressure boil, maybe your passing them made them realize they had drifted to a slower speed than they wanted. When something looks like racism or reverse racism or sexism or harassment, maybe there is a perfectly innocent cause for the persons behavior. There could be an amazing variety of possibilities. Dont limit yourself by what you see.
To find out how the great cantaloupe caper ends, check my Another Way Facebook page in August and see if we manage to harvest any before they rot! Or comment at http://www.thirdway.com/aw.
Another Way is a column from Third Way Media by Melodie Davis. She is the author of nine books, most recently Whatever Happened to Dinner and has written Another Way since 1987. She is also the producer and cohost of Shaping Families radio program (shapingfamilies.com) airing nationally.
