Ambrosia

This year's garden expansion created space for an experimental plot. Truly, we are such new gardeners that most of the beds are experiments, but this year's official mystery crop was muskmelon (what we tend to call cantaloupe). I wanted to try to grow a fruit, although the Garden Primer warns against trying to grow this melon too far north and the seed packet informed me too late that the plants should be started indoors. Dire predictions dutifully ignored, the seeds went in and the leaves came up and an enormous vine began to encircle the basil and decorate the west garden fence. Soon little fuzzy lumps appeared on some flowers of the vines, which became larger lumps and then small, oddly shaped green melons. As always happens, at some point I stopped paying attention to the vine until one day while picking basil I found a full muskmelon hiding beneath the herbs.

It seemed to take forever for the five or six melons on the plant to mature. I put paper plates underneath them to keep them from rotting while lying on the ground. I removed all the fuzzy little lumps that would never make it into melons so the plant could put its energy into growing the ones it already had. In my excitement I harvested one too early and it tasted, well, like grocery store cantaloupe.

Then it happened. Last week I was in the garden at lunchtime to get oregano for my salad and decided to peek in on the muskmelon. I lifted up the basil and noticed a bee with his head stuck in the melon. The skin had split open and this little pollinator had decided to skip the flowers and go straight for the good stuff. Not one to be afraid of bee germs, I shooed the little guy away and picked up the melon, which fell immediately off the vine. Inside I washed off the dirt and split the skin the rest of the way open. I admired the bright, orangy flesh as I removed the seeds and cut half the melon into juicy cubes. Then came the first bite and the pure bliss of eating real food. This was not the muskmelon sold in plastic sealed fruit trays...little, cold, yellow-orangish pieces of fruit with a slight hint of sugar. No, this was fruit so sweet it can compete with chocolate; fruit so sweet that eating half of the small melon was almost too much; fruit so sweet I understood for the first time how fruit could be a real dessert, rather than just a "healthy alternative". This is why I grow my own food; so that each bite is not only sustainable, but fresh, sweet and delicious. This is what eating should be -- joy.

As for the bee that pointed me to the first ripe melon of the season, I should have looked at him more closely because it turns out that what he had been drinking in was pure ambrosia -- the nectar of the gods.

And there are four more on the vine.