Old McFoster had a farm...

...E-I-E-I-O

And on that farm he had some squash

...E-I-E-I-O

Did ya know that we're farmers? Okay, well to call what we do "farming" is a stretch, but we ARE growing stuff. And we may actually be able to eat some of it, so that counts for something, right?

Since we were apartment-dwellers, we thought it would be fun to have a garden. We've been composting for a couple of years - it makes me feel like I'm not quite such an enviro-killer, and I tell myself that it helps offset the number of diapers we've dumped into the landfill. (I'm deluding myself, I know!) Our compost has occasionally produced a small cherry tomato plant in the middle of our flower bed. (Side benefit - free food!) This year, we finally decided to try growing stuff intentionally. And you know what? It works!

We've certainly learned some lessons along the way. Anyone know what this is?

That's what happens when you wait too long to pick your broccoli. They don't call those things "florets" for nothin'! Each of those little green things (you know, the part that gets stuck in your teeth?) turned into tiny yellow flowers. Oops. Apparently it's kinda tough to grow broccoli in NC. And even more apparently, you need to pick it when it mildly resembles something found in your local Harris Teeter.

But we managed to catch our cauliflower in time!

Well, almost. If you look closely, it's a little fuzzy where it started to flower, too. But we ate it anyway. Of course, this one piece is all we got, but it was a nice addition to our salad one evening!

And we still got some compost volunteers - a bunch of tomato plants (Will they be cherry or regular tomatoes? We'll see what appears. Oh the anticipation!) And this surprise addition:

My wonderful Facebook friends have identified it as a squash. It was also suggested that it could be a flesh-eating monster plant, but I'm leaning squash - that got the larger number of votes. I was banking on cantaloupe (!!!), and my friend Adam (who is as close to a farmer as anyone I know in my generation) was kind enough to tell me that I wasn't totally nuts. We'll see what kind of squash-aloupe we get. That one's pretty neat - those flowers open up every morning, and close back up by the time we get home from work.

Me, I'm waiting for these:

I hear that my granddaddy used to have a contest with his next door neighbor every year to see who could get a red tomato before July 4th. My parents had a tomato growing competition with each other last year. I declared Mom to be the winner - because Dad cheated. He hung a grocery store tomato on his plant. (In all his cunning, he forgot to remove the stickers. For the record, the stickers don't actually grow on the tomato.) I may need to turn this into a competition, just to keep a family tradition alive. Anyone wanna race me?

But I may not make it to July - I have this thing for fried green tomatoes...