Last night’s tour of our gardens revealed that this past week’s warm, humid weather has helped our flowers and vegies (and weeds) grow by leaps and bounds. The flowers in our two gardens alongside the house have grown enough to determine what they are and soon will catch up to the plants we put in. We buy mostly flower seeds because they’re much less expensive and usually end up blooming about the same time as the plants.

     Out in the vegetable garden, the watermelons and muskmelons are starting to take off and have grown a third leaf. Like the flowers, we also plant those fruits from seed. Experience has taught us that, though the watermelon and muskmelon are slow growers at the beginning, once they take off they grow like wildfire and we harvest them as early as the ones that are transplanted.

      The row crops also are starting to look like "real" vegetables and need to be weeded so they will continue to be hardy. This weekend I plan to spend some time on my hands and knees plucking out the weeds. I think I might leave the weeds in the beet row, though, to help camouflage them from the deer. Last year I weeded the row, only to have the deer eat nearly every beet green. I never can figure out why the deer have to come into the garden when they have a half dozen acres of woods and grass they can munch on. I guess the garden must be tastier.