They say that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. There’s a reason for that, I found out.

I’ve written several times about our garden: about the things I’ve learned, about the things that still puzzle me, and about the skills I still lack. Apparently, one of the many short-comings I still possess is the tendency to count one’s chickens. Case in point, once I learned to plant strawberries in October instead of spring, I informed my husband that our strawberry problems were solved. Of course, this was a lesson I learned after we’d rowed out 100 plants, but since the problem was solved, I was sure I’d be picking barrels of them to feed my family and then hocking the rest in a profitable strawberry lemonade stand, in which I’d use my kiddos as slave labor. It never occurred to me that maybe I did more than one thing wrong.

So then, I find out that there’s a particular kind of strawberry that you have to plant in Florida. Special Florida strawberries. Roger that. So, in this final latest attempt, I plant special strawberries at the special moment, and I even go for broke, and plant them with organic, homegrown compost. (The only thing I can do right is grow dirt. Can my self-esteem handle this detail?) We got a few strawberries, but my husband says that he’s seen strawberry fields and ours ain’t looking similar. We chew our $0.38 a piece strawberries several times before swallowing.

So, when a strange looking vine appeared in our garden a few weeks ago, I decided to let it grow. I later diagnosed it as a watermelon vine, sprouted from a previous year’s planting. We never ate watermelon that year, by the way. The raccoons tore into them the day they ripened. The blasted varmints didn’t even eat them, just tore them up (which is what I’ll do to their beedy-eyed necks if I see one).

Ahem. So, when we were in the grocery store last week and noticed watermelons selling for about three bucks for just a quartered section, I pulled my kids aside.

“Listen, kids. That’s too much for watermelon. [I’d learned in earlier years not to use the word “rip-off” as my preschoolers would ask too loudly in earshot of the manager, 'Mommy, can we buy that or is it a rip-off?'] In just another week or two, the juice will be dripping from our chins from our own backyard watermelons.” The Scott kids cheer with delight, and we leave the store with the kids bought off with a promise of future seed spitting contests and Mom absorbed in a self-congratulatory smile. The Proverbs 31 lady is a wise steward of funds, eh?

So, here it is, our first “watermelon” crop:

I planted pumpkins over three years ago, and they never took. I don’t make this stuff up just so I have blogging material. It’s too hot outside for that.