|
Books About Life on a Farm Written Especially for People Who Like to Read! "Highly recommended reading." The Midwest Book Review Reviews & Readers' Comments |
LeAnn R. Ralph Rural Route 2 Author E6689 970th Ave. Colfax, WI 54730 (715) 308-6336 |
| |||
| |
|
by LeAnn R. Ralph After my father died, my husband and I moved back to west central Wisconsin to live in the house my parents had built when they retired from farming. And for the first time in about fifteen years I enjoyed the opportunity to plant a garden. Well, I guess you could CALL it a garden, anyway. Seeing as it had been five or six years since Dad had planted a garden, the old garden spot was pretty well sodded in. Randy and I succeeded in digging out the sod by hand in just one tiny area before we gave up. If Dad could have seen what we called our garden, he probably would have laughed himself to tears. As a retired farmer, my father thought a proper garden needed to cover at least an acre before it could be called a garden. The rest of our garden was a piecemeal affair, with a few tomatoes in a flower bed and a several sunflowers planted by a bird house. My husband REALLY wanted pumpkins, but it would have taken us months to dig up a spot large enough for just one pumpkin plant if we wanted to grow it the conventional way. For several days I contemplated the pumpkin problem and then I experienced a rare stroke of brilliance -- which led us to try an experiment with growing pumpkins. We dug up little spots behind the barn just large enough to plant individual hills. Then we kept the grass mowed so we could find the pumpkins later on. To my great surprise, the idea worked. (I don't often have ideas that work so spectacularly well, and when I do, I like to congratulate myself.) As the summer wore on, the pumpkin plants grew at a surprising rate. Every day when I checked them, they had claimed a little more territory than the day before. The appearance of large, orange, trumpet-shaped blossoms was equally thrilling -- until I began to notice the little bulbs that were supposed to become pumpkins were turning yellow, drying up and falling off. 'What's the problem here,' I thought one day, as I gazed sadly at another little baby pumpkin that had fallen to the ground. Some idea niggled away at the back of my brain, but I couldn't quite call it to the forefront. Finally it dawned on me that I hadn't seen any bees around the pumpkin flowers. I raced into the house to inform my husband of what I'd discovered. "That's it!" I shouted gleefully as I burst through the door. Randy looked up from the book he was reading. "Half sentence," he replied. My husband claims I start conversations somewhere in the middle without giving him any background. Therefore, he says he quite often doesn't have the vaguest idea of what I'm talking about. "The pumpkins," I explained. "There aren't any bees working the flowers, so they're not getting pollinated. That's why they're falling off." I dashed back to the garden and started hand pollinating pumpkin blossoms, using a blade of grass to transfer pollen between the flowers. Within a few days the pollinated bulbs started to develop into pumpkins, so every day for about three weeks, I pollinated pumpkins. (Actually, I was astonished to realize I had formulated TWO brilliant ideas in one summer. The chances of that happening again are about as rare as the chance you'll look out your window and see a horse pedaling a bicycle down the road.) After a while, as the vines spread out and the number of viable pumpkins grew larger, I stopped blundering around in the pumpkin patch when I discovered I was snapping off vines and doing more harm than good. We had planted a pie variety, so they weren't overly large as pumpkins go. In all our little experimental venture netted us about 40 pumpkins. A few of them even grew large enough so they'd make fine Jack-o-lanterns. Then I started looking forward to having Jack-o-lanterns once again. It had been years since I'd had carved pumpkins for Halloween, not since I was a little girl when Dad used to make Jack-o-lanterns. However, I decided to leave the carving up to my husband, who is much more artistic than I am. If he let me do the carving, I knew we'd probably end up with just a big hole in the middle instead of a grinning Jack-o-lantern. After all, I'd pulled off two spectacular successes in producing the pumpkins. Why press my luck and go for a third? |
|
 Home Books Preserve Your Family History Sample Chapters Articles Free Recipes Biography More True Stories Newsletter LeAnn's Blog Links Photo Album Reviews & Comments |
|
Privacy Policy: Any information you provide to Rural Route 2 will be kept strictly confidential and will not be not given to any third parties. Telephone number is requested in case LeAnn needs to contact you about your order. E-mail address is requested so LeAnn can confirm your order. This Web Site and All Its Contents are Copyright © 2008 LeAnn R. Ralph. All Rights Reserved |
