Sod Squad

Today was my last day of
The official 4-H Summer.  We sodsquadders had a lot of fun though!  First of all, since we spent most of the last meeting either

A) Trying to heard five unruly sheep and one black alpaca who likes his sace

B) Working through the giant forest of lambsquarter (a kind of weed) as tall as me, thereby battling against angry red ants and eliminating a ground hog hole.  It could still use a lot of work though.

C) Debating whether to use a size 0 pin or a size 2 pin to stab that poor frozen beetle.  It's a long story.

Anyway, last week we never got around to actually tending to our gardens, because our 4-H group is a agriculture group.  We each have an eight feet by eight feet plot of land that we work on with plants of our own choice.  Elena and I share a plot, although she did not come today so I tended to it like it was my own.

Originally, Elena and I planted sunflowers and a few muskmelons.  But the seed packets got mixed up and what should have been a few melons turned into a tangled mess of cukes, ready to take on the world.  That and weeds were always waiting on the border of our garden, ready to slip in when we left.

When I first came to Sod Squad, there was a dry earth path along the gardens, with tomatoes to the right.  However, the tomatoes grew up, and the path is now carpeted with crab grass and stray tomatoes or cucumbers.

However, my unthinned sunflowers are now falling over, almost crushing a watermelon, landing on top of my neighbor's okra, and pulling others out of the ground.  I pulled them out but it's like trying to pull heavy, solid bamboo out of the ground, leaves bigger that your head flapping in your face, and when you turn, the several pound flower whacking anyone in the vicinity.  It's a distaster, obviously.

Anyway, this week I had to pull out four sunflowers as thick as my arm and chop them into small, two foot bits for putting in the compost.  Also, everybody's cucumbers (four plants as big as your average carpet) have been struck down with "mosaic disease" (a disease spread by cucumber beetles which turns a healthy, sprawling cucumber into a withered brown plant with mottled green/yellow leaves.  On top of that, the two damp days last week caused "powdered mold" to attack our melon plants with the same ferocity as the mosaic disease.  (bad luck?)

Sorry to go, but this is already a very long post, and I have to go, so talk to you tomorrow!