Well, it did its best. I should have had Jess hold her hand in this shot for scale, but this is actually a cantaloupe about the side of an egg. It’s actually an Alaskan cantaloupe (that’s what the folks at the seed catalog called it), so we thunk it would do well up here in the woods. But the cantaloupe never sprouted with Jessica’s other seeds this spring, and when she planted more seeds outdoors and watered them all summer, the biggest cantaloupe ended up about the size of an egg.

We didn’t eat any of it, but Jess saved the seeds. We’ll see what develops next year, when we have a greenhouse. More manure would have helped, too. But next year we’re hoping to get a trailer hitch for the BGF, and a used trailer (somewhere), and then we can haul manure and wood and noisy kids anytime we need to, without a pickup truck. And the upshot is, maybe we really can grow our own cantaloupe. Large enough to eat, that is.