Pleasure and Melons (Cold Summer)

Pleasure and melons
Want the same weather
--Italian proverb

I DON'T LIKE spring to be better than summer. It implies something unfortunate, like the best of life is in anticipation and planting, and the harvest can never live up. July was tomatoless. August was half over before I saw the first Black Krim breaking, ending the big green stalemate that was interminable this cold summer. If I'd planted some bitchass cherry tomatoes I'd have long been picking, but that simply isn't the way I roll. I'm not into cherry tomatoes and rather resent consolation prizes.

Turned out this would have been a season to insure against disappointment, but instead I planted eggplants and edamame and the most ambitious, unreasonable heirloom tomatoes--all of which are now sickly, under-performing, shivering every dewy morning. I even switched from my dependable sauce variety, Super Marzano, a megavirile hybrid impervious to setbacks, to the vulnerable, romantic heirloom San Marzano Gigante. The latter is an old school version of the same fine paste tomato; it lacks the usual hybrid goodies (disease resistance, insane profligacy) but makes beautiful, odd-shaped, enormous tomatoes purported to be delicious. And you can save the seeds. It's an heirloom. That's classy.

Alas, I won't be saving any seeds. My San Marzano Gigantes got verticillium. The lush green tops are a fraud, given away by the yellow-and-brown-chevroned leaves at the base. When I grow the Super hybrids, two plants give me a year's worth of tomato sauce. The lovely heirlooms I planted this time will give me a dinner or two at best. But I can't hate; who knows what they could have done with a bit more bravery, in heat and undiseased soil.

Hot weather makes me want to be superficial. Which can be nice sometimes. If it's cold I have to keep considering serious matters instead of offering my bikini self up to the sun and thinking nothing. Plants worry overmuch in the cold too. They just can't seem to relax.

I like to grouse, so good things often happen just to spite me. This cold summer I grew my first successful melon, over at the school garden. Watermelons always top the kid request list, but I'd never been willing to plant them, because I don't like teaching children that gardening is about disappointment and I never thought we could harvest a damn watermelon. If all warm-weather crops want richness and heat, watermelons want both more. More than zucchini, more than tomatoes, more than peppers, more than eggplants, more than cucumbers--hell, even more than other melons.

In spring's planting daze I snuck two plants of an early, small watermelon variety into an already-overstuffed bed we'd newly constructed at the school, making no fuss so as not to build up childish hopes. The soil was lush, the courtyard location snug and warm, and in late July a softball-sized watermelon occurred. No kid ever saw it, as far as I know. (The school is abandoned to custodians and construction workers in late summer. They all like beans and squash.) Like a dummy I picked the prize when it was utterly unripe and had to feed it to my hens. But I think I saw a couple other set fruits nestled among those hand-shaped leaves.

In the same school bed with the watermelons I grew my first successful Bay Area cucumbers and made a half gallon jar of pickles, which ought to keep until Back to School time. Maybe more watermelons will be ripe for the kiddos by then too. Maybe not.

But there's always picking. Even in a cold summer garden.

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