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Sliced Cantaloupe And Honeydew In Bowls Photo by Pexels/karolinagrabowska
Sweet, juicy, melons are one of the special pleasures of summer breakfasts and cold lunches. Their flavor, aroma, and high amounts of vitamins A and C make melons a healthy delicacy. Most of the melons we grow, including muskmelons, honeydews, casaba, and Crenshaws, are variations of the same species (
Cucumis melo).
Watermelons are less closely related but are grown the same way. Small watermelons (Citrullus lanatus) and orange-fleshed muskmelons, often called cantaloupes, are easy crops for beginning gardeners. Some melons require more gardening skills or a perfect climate, but all are grown in much the same way.
White Mulberry, photo, Wikipedia Commons
As most of you know we recently bought 4 acres with a house near the border of Mexico. It’s a nice house but the land around the house needs a lot of work. Fortunately, we’re up the task and even look forward to it. One thing we’re happy about it that we don’t have to do a lot of clearing of the sticker bushes, including mesquite, found elsewhere in abundance. That was already done before we got here. We also were fortunate that the land is not rocky. We wouldn’t have bought it if it were.
Carole Turek of Hummingbird Spot posed with her camera on a photography trip (Photo courtesy/provided by Carole Turek)
I can recall a particular part of my childhood with fondness, sitting on my Grandma’s farmhouse porch and watching hummingbirds swarm her feeders. Seeing a dozen feeders hung spread out on her front and back porch captivated me, and she loved their company every year when they would visit her farm. With her passing, I developed a passion for the amazing birds that kept me connected to her memory. This led me to really research the ways to care for them over the years, from helpful books to watching informative videos, which eventually brought me to stumble across the great resource that is Hummingbird Spot on YouTube.
Federal and State mandates about keeping our distance from others was not an issue for us as we live that way normally. The issue with us was being told by authorities we had to isolate as opposed to it being our free choice. Perhaps the scary part for us was the actual virus itself where a carrier of the disease could pass it on to others being totally unaware they were even infected. The distrust and fear generated was unnatural for us. It created a social atmosphere for us that made it such that we didn’t know who to trust. Coupled with the rising death toll from the disease it separated us from friends and our normal self isolation was suddenly a mandated and forced isolation.