Grown Up Farmville

The topic of this post is as the title states. We are now at the almost very end of August and just about everything in Farmville has "grown-up". The only things left that are still working their way through their journey to the table are the pumpkins, winter squash, and sunflowers. Very shortly, we will add some more to the list, but those will be the newly planted Fall vegetables and they will have their own post to explain their story. The pictures with this post are all about the corn. The main reason is I'm not very skilled at using this blog software and making pictures conform to the text has been tough. I'll put some more posts up with comparison pictures of the other crops we grew this summer and rely on everyone's ability to make sense of it. If any of it's confusing, feel free to ask questions via the comments feature. The corn is the absolute poster child for showing how dramatically things change in just three or four months time. The early picture shows them just coming up and then the later pictures show them at almost nine feet tall. That's a lot of change. When they were first coming up, it was hard to imagine they would grow to where they are at now. I remember watching the non-stop wind blow them sideways and wondering if I would come out one day and find them gone. Luckily they hung in there and, despite the unusually cool season, did very well. Looking back over the season, we harvested quite a bit of corn. We even froze some. At this stage, I'm cutting the stalks to use for decorating the pumpkin patch. One of my many children swears she is going to make the dead tree in the back the scariest thing known at Halloween. I think we have everything we need to do that. We'll post pictures later if we pull this off.

Our other crops that grew up this summer in Farmville also provided a very bountiful harvest. They included watermelons, cantaloupes, crenshaw melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, basil, dill, and various other herbs. The melons attracted some gophers and we ended up having to share some of the harvest with them. Those that know me well understand how much that bothers me. In the end, I made the painful but mature decision to not do battle with them. I had some pretty wicked tactics lined up to use in getting rid of them but more than likely, it would have led to the complete destruction of Farmville. I guess splitting the harvest with them is a small price to pay for having my garden not look like a nuclear battlefield on a distant planet.

The take away message from this post is that the grown up version of a garden is a good thing. It means the harvest has provided a summer full of produce for the table as well as a well stocked freezer and pantry. As the garden chores lessen due to this grown up stage we are in, it affords the time to work on other projects. One of the projects we in Farmville are moving into is making grown up beverages. More specifically, wine. We'll save that discussion for a future post where we can do proper justice to the winemaking process. The next post or two (not sure how difficult posting a bunch of pictures will be just yet) will be devoted to comparison pictures of the various things we grew this past spring and summer. Enjoy.