… where the water melons grow…
Continuing last time’s theme of cultivating new life (OK, different context), check out this baby water melon peeping coyly from behind the foliage on our patio:
I was wondering whether water melons would grow in San Francisco mostly because I thought the idea of home-grown water melon sounded exotic, like having a zebra in the back garden or something (Martin reckons I should stick to water melon), so I asked a few folk whether it would work or not. Half of the people who I asked said yes, and the other half said no. One of the most bizarre (to us as foreigners at least) cultural taboos in Argentina is that even if you really don’t have the foggiest clue, it is not acceptable to say “I really don’t have the foggiest clue” and you have to come up with an answer, which may or may not have any bearing on reality, and you have to say it in a bright and confident manner so that the person who asked you the question doesn’t realise that actually you don’t have the foggiest clue. This makes obtaining directions a particularly arduous process.
Clearly the only way to find out whether water melons would grow in San Francisco was therefore to try it out for myself. (This is more or less what we do when asking for directions as well; choose the most promising of the available answers and follow it until either we reach our destination, or until we are so completely adrift that we have neither hope of finding our location nor of making it back to where we started asking from, at which point we begin the process of canvassing a new round of opinions). So anyway, I saved a bunch of seeds and threw them into a likely looking patch of spare flowerbed. The vines are going well, and hidden underneath are three baby water melons (I’ve found three anyway, who knows what else might be under there; a zebra, couple of lions…). At the moment they are roughly pear-sized so things could still go either way, but it is starting to look as though the “ayes” might have it.