Yellow Doll Melon in its Hammock When I was a child in the 1950s in the Canadian Prairies, I dreamed of growing exotic things in our mundane garden: maybe giant pumpkins or watermelons! We did manage to grow a pretty decent crop of sugar pumpkins one year (we kids hawked them on the highway for 10 cents a pumpkin-- a bargain even in that day). But the watermelons never flourished. Perhaps for others, but not on our little grain farm. Fast forward to the 1970s when our kids were of that magical Jack-in-the-Beanstock gardening stage. We grew magnificent zucchinis-- they were so thrilled to have a monster zucchini almost as big and as heavy as they were (not knowing that those monsters are close to inedible, that you have to hack through the rock-hard skin with a pneumatic drill and the seeds would be the size of tums). But no watermelons grew. Fast forward to the current age-- old retired folks living on Vancouver Island with cedar planters high enough that we don't have to be
Living the Green Life