When You Marry an Artist

When married to a wonderful creative artist, ya never know what ya gonna get.  For example, years ago I mentioned, "How 'bout us makin' our own Christmas cards" to her and now we have years of our fun family settings set to Christmas cards. If you aint seen them just look down through the archives of this, our blog, dated around Christmas-time and you will see what I mean. With this in mind it shoulda not surprised me when after casually mentioning that the fridge was getting rusty and we would soon hafta paint it, that this amazing creation began to appear. (To get the whole shot, I had to open the fridge door)

Now I am looking around for what else to mention that needs painting.:-)

Volunteer Squash

In our compost pile out back, from time to time, we find what Peggy and I call "volunteers".  As we toss out our usual "nanner" peels, egg shells, coffee grounds, cucumber peelings, and mounds of citrus rinds, etc., occasionally, raw seeds wind up being planted by accident in the rich, worm-filled pile of loam that the compost has turned into, and which we then use for our different gardening projects.  This year in the Spring, I replenished the soil in our grape arbor with several buckets of the rich compost soil, and a few weeks later while I  was weeding, I noticed something growing there amongst the grapes vines, that did not look like grape vines, but still, it looked like it might be a "keeper".  I consulted Peg and we agreed to let this grow awhile and see what it was gonna do.  Well, I kinda forgot about it and it grew up mostly hidden from view in the thick of the lush grape leaves and vines, started climbing up, over and down the front of our arbor, and began looking rather 'squashy'.  Sadly, before the small green striped squashes could get big as your thumb, the birds would "snick" them off, leaving nothing but bare vine.  Finally, one escaped the birdie 'wrath', and matured into a big beautiful Butternut squash.

 I watched it grow and ripen till I couldn't stand it any longer and picked it this morning.

Truly a Gift from the Lord, this squash is destined for a grateful supper, soon.  In the meantime, another "volunteer" is vining away over in the compost pile.  I have been moving it out of my way, as I mow the lawn, and am trying to train it to run toward the fence instead of 'trah-lah-lah-ing" merrily through the yard as it has been doing.  Since there are no flowers as of yet, we are wondering what this young upstart volunteer will bring to our table.  Mercifully, we are hoping it won't be more cucumbers 'cause we have a cabinet full of Peggy's bread-and-butter pickles, not to mention our bellies are full of cucumbers, as are those of our friends and neighbors as well. The other day I carried a grocery sack packed "chocka-blok", bursting outa the seams with cucumbers to one of the neighbors, since their cars were both in the driveway. We thought it kinda strange that they didn't answer the door this time. It might be our imagination, but we think it might be because they are tired of us foisting sackfuls of cukes onto them and evah body else on the street.  We are, and apparently everybody else is downright "cuked out" and so now we can't find anymore volunteers who will take any more of them off our hands. And now we'll just have to wait to see what this next patch is gonna spring on us this Summer.