By Staff
For this column I wanted to share a moment I experienced in my garden.
A memory is a wonderful thing, to be able to think back upon a certain instance in one's past, to be able to pull it out and relish it, to reminisce.
I can recall a hot day in the summer, I bought a cantaloupe (what we call cantaloupes are actually musk melons) at a roadside vegetable/fruit stand.
I adore a good melon that's home-grown.
What you get is a melon during its finally days on the vine which packs in the sweet sugars.
This sweetness is missing from commercial melons picked green for shipping.
I picked out a "good" one.
I smell the stem end to see if it is ripe. A green one won't have a fragrant, sweet, musk melon aroma, whereas a ripe one will.
It also had a firm, light straw yellow rind with lots of tan shallow veins or netting.
I was hoping for a sweet, musky taste, like the old musk melons once had, and it has to have flesh the color of salmon.
After the musk melon feast, I put the rinds out in the garden (as I never throw away any egg shells, banana peels, coffee grounds, tea bags, potato skins or any other plant matter.
They get thrown in to a small hole, dug into my garden, with the idea to bury it later.
Well, days alter the domed rind was starting to decompose.
It was starting to cave in.
Later, on one of my garden walk-abouts, I noticed the rind.
It reminded me of a plush bean bag and in the center sat nestled a huge, brown, portly toad.
From a short distance away, I pulled up a seat. I believed this might prove to be very entertaining. How right I was.
I also noticed crawling around, up, on and under, flying in and landing on the melon, a mixed bag of insects – crickets, yellow jackets, earwigs, flies, gnats, centipedes, millipedes, beetles and ants.
As a bug moved, the toad had only but to move its head. It was interesting. A toad's tongue doesn't fly or flick out like one would expect. Instead, this one grabbed it with its mouth and wolfed it down.
Charge after charge, wave after wave, they came.
As a bug crawled up or flew in, it crammed in insect after insect. After a while, the toad exhausted the insect onslaught.
What a gluttonous feast.
This was a small victory for my garden. Down with the enemy, down with garden pests – foe of all gardens.