white watermelons...

...are not as tasty as the red ones. But, if you splash a little salt on there, these albino juicy fruits are pretty good.

Lately, I have participated in the task of saving the crops from the mighty melon vines that aim to choke the corn and suck the nutrients away from the beans.

The way we save the fields begins with hauling in the watermelons. The melons are the size of small bowling balls (like duck pin bowling balls) and are just as heavy. We rip the melon from the vine and clunk it into a bucket. Once the bucket is full, we climb out of the plants and lug the bucket onto our heads and walk the 50 feet to the dumping tree. Taking each melon individually, we throw it to the earth and listen to the satisfying crack of the rind splitting open. Each melon gets tossed and broken. What begins as fun destructive feeling behavior ends with hundreds of cracked melons piled beneath a tree, arms that feel like rubber and heads that feel like they've carried boulders for two hours.

Fast forward three days. We plop down amongst the melons that are in various stages of rotting. We pull the fruit open and dump the innards into a wide rimmed bucket. Ideally, one hand scoop should retrieve all the dripping watermelon guts easily. The seeds and the flesh are all together and still resembling a watermelon, however white. But, if your field buddy is a bit of a procastinator and you postpone the melon gut dumping until a week after the breaking, you have on your hands a bit of a maggot infestation problem. The smell of rotting fruit can become unbearable, and the previously inoffensive juice is now yellow and full of squirming white worms a couple millimeters long.

Handling the tickling of the maggots takes a mighty strong stomach, and a hard headed person to pursue the job to the end. Especially when one keeps in mind that once the bucket of guts is dumped, and dried in the sun, and the seeds are pounded into a fine powder, it is simply put into meals as a little bit of vitamin enrichment. After hours of head-aching lugging and tiring melon breaking, followed by maggot sorting and all we get is a little bit of vitamin C powder? Once again, all I can do is shake my head in amazement at all the work work work that makes Garly's world go round.