I cantabelieve it's not squash!!!!

The three older kids are involved in 4 H this year. First rule: NO ANIMAL PROJECTS. Second rule: Must be something mom can do. Third rule: Only two per kid. Being the wonderful mom that I am, I decided to let them have some say in what they picked. By "some say" I mean that I gently directed their interest toward certain projects that I thought were cool. For example, I would say, "You want to do Fishing? Hmmm....I don't think you would like that one very much. I think you would enjoy Photography!"

So Mike is doing Quick Breads and Gardening, Rach is doing Photography and Cake Decorating, and Dave is doing Photography and Gardening. Like how they overlap? This way, I'm only doing 4 projects instead of 6. I mean, THEY are only doing 4 projects instead of 6.

Let's focus on Gardening.

For the boys' projects, they needed to do 4 plants each. Mike chose pumpkins, cucumbers, corn, and green beans. Dave chose orange peppers (he loves everything orange, you will see that theme often), cucumbers, Big Max pumpkins, and peas. We thought the orange peppers were goners so we replaced it with a chili pepper plant. After we did that his orange pepper started to flower. Who knew?

So since we had to plant the garden anyway, I decided to grow some stuff for myself. Obviously, I wanted to grow things that we liked. No sense having a garden full of asparagus. It started off as a small garden, 10 feet by 20 feet. Then I got hooked. Three rototilling sessions later and the garden is now over twice as big as when it first started. One of the plants we wanted to grow was cantaloupes. We all love cantaloupe. Can't go wrong with the melon. I bought some seeds. Hybrid, big sweet melons. I planted them, watered them, sang Kumbaya to them.

They didn't come up. Nothing.

I figured I planted them too deep and didn't water them enough. So I did what any self respecting gardener would do. I got myself to Home Depot and bought me some plants! I checked the labels on all three plants carefully. "Cantaloupes." Yup. That's what I want. I planted them in the garden. I lovingly coddled them and spoke sweet nothings into their ears. To my surprise they actually grew! And grew and grew and grew. I have three very big, healthy and happy cantaloupe plants! Success! I can almost taste them.

I noticed something a bit alarming the other day. Since I've never grown cantaloupes, I don't know what they look like before they mature. Looking at the fruit, I am thinking that they look more like squash than melons. Hmmm. That's not good. Yesterday, I recognized the yellow things hanging off the plants.

Summer squash.

You've got to be kidding me!!! ALL THREE PLANTS. Not a melon among them. I took a picture, which I will attempt to attach to this blog of my "cantaloupe." So now, instead of enjoy sweet melons this summer, we are looking forward to a bumper crop of squash. The kids are so disappointed.

Next year, I'm starting everything from seed so I know what we are planting (of course, I say that now, let's see what happens when spring gets here and I forget all about it). Can you put summer squash in a fruit salad?