Mint for Tea & Mini-Watermelons
Ben and Hope have been picking bags and bags of mint for our winter tea. The house smells wonderful with all the mint drying in bunches hanging from the ceiling. We strip the stems off since that is where the bitter taste is, leaving the aromatic leaves.
While picking the mint Ben also collected some mint rhizomes, the roots, for transplanting over to the upper pond and a few for planting in our cottage. Mint does well in low light conditions and loves plenty of water although I’ve also seen it thriving in full light.
Mystery Watermelon Marks
This year we got two itty-bitty, teeny-tiny watermelons. On the side of one were interesting little parallel marks. I think they were made by a young mouse who hadn’t figured out yet to bite in just one place. The arc of the marks might represent the arc of it’s neck and body as it tried to bite into the melon. Other ideas?
Outdoors: 60째F/41째F Partially Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 67째F/62째F Katya born yesterday morning
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
how do you tell if your watermelon is ripe? I've got about 30 of these, and I cut into one and it was still white with a little red. how do you do it?
These were ripe because I needed the place where they were growing in the south end shed for fall sow farrowing. This was one of those times when you go up to the watermelon and say, "You are ripe" and pick it.
Actually, I don't know. I just had to pick them. They do have that hollow thump sound that I normally associate with a ripe watermelon, even the little one. So now I need to open them and we'll see if they're ripe or not… They sort of got incidentally included in the mint photo.
Looks like the spirals of an old notebook that was used to keep it off the ground.
Woodpecker?
The marks look too regular to be animal-caused. I had some gouges out of my Hubbards from deer mouths, before I put the electric fence around the garden :-)
Let us know how the mini watermelons taste. I have never tried to grow them but every time (3x, different years) I have paid the horrible store prices for the things they have been awful — not ripe, not sweet, not crisp. I won't ever buy them again.
I'll concur on the mouse theory. I've seen the same markings on my pumpkins. The teeth marks are very distinctive and you can imagine little curls of rind like from a wood plane.
Either that or the chipmunks have created a Mechanized Infantry Division and they've been out on maneuvers.
We got a couple of watermelons the size of the smallest one you have there. I broke them open and ate them; very good! Not a ripe melon flavor, but it's tasty.
It was mostly white colored with a tinge of pink in the middle.
Almost looks like tread marks from a shoe. Aliens!?!?
We finally finished our last watermelon just last week (!) This horrible hot record breaking drought year is the first year I have ever been successful growing watermelons in Wisconsin, and we had enough of them that the last one just sat on our wooden kitchen floor until I decided I really better cut into it and see how it was. It still looked entirely fine on the outside–no soft spots or color changes. I knew that the original job of a watermelon was to store water from the wet into the dry season in Africa, so I figured they must have some shelf life without refrigeration.
Well, it was O.K. Not terrific, and I will try to eat all watermelons by, um, October in the future, but surprisingly good. It had gotten soft and dry around where the seeds were, but was completely unchanged nearer to the rind. So, the part that is usually the tastiest had lost its flavor, but the rest of it was the same as always. I used a serrated steak knife to worry away the odd pink almost fluffy stuff that included the seeds, and the moist, crisp flesh left was pretty good eating.