If you have been reading my blogs for a while you are probably aware of the fact that I am a newly retired pumpkin farmer. Most of the pumpkin ground has been seeded into native grasses and wildflowers and I was planning to put my feet up and taking it easy……wrong!

You see I didn’t seed all of the ground into native grasses and wildflowers. I figured I would save a little of the ground to ensure my vegetable garden was large enough. In fact I made it large enough so that I could plant half the vegetable garden and Summer-fallow the other half.

Now to all of you readers who didn’t grow up on the farm and are asking yourself what the heck does Summer-fallow mean let me explain. That means I will only plant half the garden and leave the other half black. To ensure that I will have to till the unplanted portion several times during the summer.

There is a method to my madness as the unplanted part of the garden gets a years rest that allows plant litter and humus to decompose and produce a more fertile soil. So the next year the garden is guaranteed to produce blue ribbon winners at the Traverse County Fair. 🙂

Things were going well this spring until the large area of black ground became disconcerting to me. For several weeks I fought off the feelings until I finally caved. I went to the garden center and bought a package of watermelon seeds.

I have never been a very successful watermelon farmer. Often the seeds never germinated and the few that did usually produced small tasteless melons. So to compensate for that possibility I tried a new type of melon,  planted eight hills of them with ten seeds in each hill.

As the watermelon plants grew and the vines spread out the black ground began to disappear. I began to feel better.

The summer rains were abundant and the heat was intense. It was perfect watermelon growing weather which I was not aware of since my past watermelon growing experiences had been so futile.

A couple weeks ago as I gazed out into the watermelon patch I began to count the ripening melons. I gulped because the thirty melons protruding up through the vines were a larger crop than Kathie and I would ever be able to eat.

How will we ever get rid of all of those melons?

Then deep in my brain I heard a voice whispering “bucket list”. At first I thought what could that voice be referring to and then it dawned on me. The excess watermelons could provide us the opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do.

Our grown children and their families live in three different towns miles apart. With the pandemic we have not been able to get together very often. But the watermelon overpopulation would give Kathie and I the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve always wanted to do.

We would load a couple melons for each family into the car, fill the car with gas and make deliveries to each household all in the same day. The round trip deliveries would total around four hundred miles!

It would be one more bucket list goal accomplished.

So off we went not even messaging any family members to reveal our upcoming surprise visits.

We arrived at our youngest daughter’s home and as she greeted us at the front door she was in the process of brushing her teeth. That was a fairly strong hint that our visit at their house would be fairly brief and it was.

The smiles on their faces made even the brief visit worthwhile however.

Arriving at our son’s house only two grandchildren were home. We had a nice visit and got a photo of our granddaughter posing in front of the melons.

Then it was off to visit our last family a one hundred and ten mile trek.

With two watermelons in tow we pulled into their farmyard and surprised them too.

They had just returned home from a weekend at the lake and the kitchen floor was cluttered with camping equipment. I am sure they were in no mood to entertain but their smiles indicated their joy in seeing us.

We had a fun but short visit and another bucket list dream had been achieved. But now there was that two hundred mile trip home. 🙁

But little did we realize the visiting was not yet complete.

We decided to take a road that we had never traveled before and the new route led us back to Fargo where our son and his family lived. We had visited their home earlier in the day when only two grandchildren were home.

We decided what the heck there was no bucket list rule saying you couldn’t visit the same house twice in the same day so we pulled into their driveway and made a surprise visit number two.

We hit pay dirt this time as the whole family was present. In fact they were in the middle of their evening dinner which resulted in pay dirt number two for Kathie and I when they invited us to join them. 🙂

So we left Fargo with full stomachs and happy memories of our fourth short family visit.

Bucket list accomplishments are so much fun.

In fact there was a commercial on television that describes that four hundred mile day perfectly. I believe we would call the experience…..priceless! 🙂

Until next time.