Some fucker STOLE my watermelons!

The BBQ Pit
1

Background: my church has set up a community garden on their property. Pay $30 for the year, and you get a 4’ x 16’ plot of homemade, organic compost, and you get to grow anything you want (except, no squash. Last year, they were overrun by squash beetles, and they don’t use insecticide. So, no squash this year.)

The garden also contributes 10% of its produce to local food banks, because the food banks have such a hard time getting fresh veggies and fruits.

Me? I’m a baby gardener. I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but I haven’t had any place to garden before. I was so eager to get started, I planted stuff on February 15th (the first official growing day of our zone). Half of it promptly died off thanks to a late frost.

Still, I’ve had delightful success. Fresh strawberries. Yellow onions. Sunflowers now ready to harvest. Spinach galore. Lettuce (that was eaten by bunnies, until I sprinkled chili pepper on them. One-half of one was eaten, and somewhere out there was a bunny breathing fire). Bell peppers.

I also, on the communal hillside for stuff that takes a lot of space to grow, planted two watermelon vines and two cucumber vines. I thought they’d been killed off by the kids running back and forth, but they came back. Then, a month ago, I saw, hidden under the leaves, baby watermelons!

Oh, how I pampered them. I watered them. I spoke lovingly to them of the day I would rip them away from their mother vine, hack them into pieces and share bits of their delectable corpses with my friends, that we might devour them with glee. The three of them grew happily, soaking in the sun and turning it into wonderfully sweet, pink flesh.

Yesterday, I went to water, weed, whack (the catnip needs regular whacking), and to check on my precious watermelons. I was thinking that either this weekend or next, they’d be ready for the slaughter. What did I find? Three bare spots and NO WATERMELONS!

At first, I thought it was the weekly harvest for the food bank, but they only take 10% of what’s ripe. Not all three!

Some fuckers stole all three of my watermelons! BASTARDS! I kill you! I stab you and set you on fire and dance around your misbegotten ashes! They were mine, do you hear me? MINE! Long had I awaited the sweet thunk of knife into melon, and the dripping juices running down my fingers and chin, and you have stolen this from me!

Death is not good enough for you. You should be raked and pruned. You should be stripped of your own fruit and watch it eaten in front of you. You should be ground to bits and composted for my plot. You should be infested with sap-sucking beetles and soaked in seaweed fertilizer until you bring forth ten times the watermelon you deprived me of!

pant

heave

shakes fist at the heavens, curses, and begins to cry softly

(There are three tiny baby watermelons currently growing on the same vine, and I’m going to mark them with my name, so everyone knows they belong to me!)

2

I just want you to know that I feel your pain. I’ve had melons stolen from my plot in past years.

Bastards. Death is too good for them. :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

3

Mmmm…I wonder how bacon salt would taste on watermelon?

Why, yes, my father was from the mid-West and I grew up putting salt on my watermelon. Why do you ask?

We had a garden one year, and among the carrots and tomatoes and cantaloupe were blueberries…but we never got any blueberries.

Until my children admitted years later that they would go into the garden with their friends and eat all the blueberries.

Seriously, phouka, I’m not sure how community gardens work. Is there a Head Green Thumb and Fertilizer Spreading person you can ask to keep an eye over your watermelons?

4

That sucks! I would be crushed. I’ve always dreamed of growing melon but it doesn’t lend itself to a fire escape. :frowning:

5

Put up a sign, saying one melon has been poisoned.

6

Or a sign that says: You just stole melons that were going to a food bank. Therefore, you are a huger asshole than you thought. Die in a fire.

7

Judging by the apparent asshole quotient of these people, he’d come back to find the sign reading “[del]One[/del]Two of these melons has been poisoned.”

8

Forget that other nonsense. When these are close to ripe, you gotta put on a straw hat, load the shotgun with rock salt, and sit out in the melon patch. Till then, practice shouting stuff like “git out’n mah melons, you low-down varmints!”

9

I would do this. Even at church. :mad:

Sorry, honey.

10

Considering that we routinely give out extra produce to the neighbors, it’s even more heinous. That’s why I grow Moon and Stars watermelons now. They are not immediately identifiable to the melon thieves, and easily recognized in the garbage bins. I haven’t had to knock on any doors THIS year so far.

11

You better ask the police to check out the brothers of Polk Salad Annie. I don’t know but I’ve heard that’s all they’re fit for, stealing water melons.

12

That bites big time. I grow vegies, too, and nothing pisses me off like when my produce is messed with. With me, it’s rats nibbling the carrots and feral cats using the seedling bed for a toilet.

We should set veg garden alarms like in the beginning of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I particularly like the one which had a garden gnome whose eyes blinked red to show it was armed.

13

I feel your pain. One year, renting the basement of a dilapidated ranch house (top floor was unoccupied) I put in a few flowers to make the place more cheery.

I planted glads, but being a noob, didn’t plant the bulbs deep enough–I had dazzling color shooting out of the ground in all sorts of crazy angles. In the center, was one glorious sunflower. Now, when you’re a bit down on things, and skies are gray, there’s nothing like coming home to a giant, happy, obnoxiously-yellow-if-it-weren’t-natural sunflower. Its giant size always reminded me of being a kid – how many other plants tower over you like that?

Oh man, it pains me to keep going, and you must know where I’m heading. One night, I came home to half a stalk. Crestfallen, I thought my girlfriend had cut it and put it in a vase (I even practiced nonchalantly asking her about it – thinking she had good intentions.) No, she didn’t. The icy pit grew deeper, in the same way phouka must have realized it wasn’t the food bank.

The next morning, the nut-kick got that much stronger. To get to the sunflower, they trampled all over my glads, breaking most of them.

Miserable.

If you notice, some of my other posts (most recently about locking up a computer or something) have to do with planting poison ivy. Yes, I’m that jaded.

My heart goes out to you phouka.

14

Someone dug up every flower I planted in the front yard a few years ago. Including a bougainvillea…good news there is that will almost always kill the plant as they have no root ball, and the roots break. Hope it didn’t live for them. Now everything I plant out there has THORNS.

Acid Lamp, those moon & stars melons are very cool. Where do you get the seeds?

15

Those moon & stars melons are awesome! :cool:

People walking by my mom’s house have stolen her plants on several occasions- still in the frigging pots! :rolleyes: Not to mention using her garden hose to wash sand off themselves, their children, and all of their crap… sometimes living at the beach really sucks. Generally, that’s Memorial Day straight through to Labor Day.

16

Holy crap that sucks! I’ve never been able to grow a melon to killin’ time. The dogs figured out what they were and ate them all. :frowning: I hope your thief(ves) got a tummy ache!

17

And, are they nice and sweet, like real watermelons.
I grew striped melons once, back in the day, and they were nowhere as sweet as the solid green ones.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a solid green watermelon in eons!
And phouka, take some comfort in the thought that stolen melons are yummier than earned ones. :stuck_out_tongue:
Peace,
mangeorge

18

All right-thinking persons eat salt on watermelon! But bacon salt… I dunno.

I’ve never seen Moon and Stars watermelons – those are too cool.

And asshats who steal watermelons should have to eat seeds until a melon grows in their stomachs! Jerks.

I loves me some watermelon.

19

And I grew up putting salt on all kinds of melons. And on everything else. Tons of salt.
Mangeorge stands up:
“My name is mangeorge, and I am a salter of beautiful, naturally sweet, watermelons.”.
Other dereiects:
“Hi, mangeorge”.
Three more months, clean and I get my coin. :stuck_out_tongue:
BTW; To properly eat a watermrlon, drop it on the ground till it splits open, take out the middle (heart), enjoy. All the rest is compost.

20

My MIL’s family came from farm, and only the very middle of the watermelon was EVER eaten by humans. The rest was all considered rind and slopped to the pigs.