Sometime this summer, I hosted a birthday party for a young'un. We had watermelon on the deck and of course, spit seeds everywhere. On my deck, I have a small 6" transition between the concrete and the wood, and I filled that space with lava rocks, like you'd put in your outdoor grill.
Come the middle of August, and I notice one small plant working its way up between the rocks. I mention that I need to get out the Round-Up and Milady says it's a watermelon vine. Leave it alone, so I left it alone.
The darn thing has taken over the whole area.
What's even more amazing is that it did all this in the midst of the worst drought we've had in a couple of years. Then, to cap off the strangeness, it's putting on melons. We've got three or four laying on the deck. The largest one, below, is about 6 inches long.
I'm going to let it go until the first frost, or until Milady tires of it. Ain't that the damndest thing you've ever seen?
3 comments:
Over in Missouri we call them "volunteers".
We toss all our kitchen scraps in our mulch pile. A couple years ago we got a vine just like that one next to the pile. We managed to harvest three or four edible melons.
Free food!
Some 5,000 years ago near what is now Monroe, Louisiana, a bunch of Indians sat around eating muscadines and spitting out the seeds. Soon afterwards, they built a mound on the spot. Along came an archaeologist who tested the mound. At the original ground level and still viable, he found those muscadine seeds. They're now in the archaeology lab at ULM.
Proof of concept; be careful where you spread your seeds, you never know when one might take root and bring forth fruit.
Andy Ford
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