My Old Garden Journal

Today we bought perrenials, annuals, and looked at vegetables and herbs for our garden. I consulted some old garden notes of mine - one section of the journal mentioned a list of plants for that year's garden:

Bleets - a vegetable grown for the sweet purple roots. The root is ready to harvest when the plants put out round, white, fluffy blossoms. The worst pest is wolf-beetles. Some gardeners have recently begun to combat beetle outbreaks by using llama wasps. Bleets are notorious for staining wool garments.

Flocolli - Green cabbage family vegetable grown for the flower heads, eaten in the bud. If allowed to bolt, the seeds queue up in "v" shapes and fly south for the winter.

Plumpkins - Similar to the more familiar squash-family member, but even rounder and with impish smiles. Look lovely in sun bonnets, which can be used to prevent sunburn.

Monkmelons - Rarely grown due to low yields. Each plot will grow only one, and they avoid companion planting. Very difficult to pollenate. Seeds grow into peculiar shapes, like little black medieval Latin characters. Some gardeners insist the plants do better if exposed to chant.

Tomandos - The crack troops of the garden, crossing enemy lines and setting explosive red globes packed with vitamin C.

Lemon Blam - mistaken for an herb, this actually refers to the guilty pleasure of eating lemon meringue pie hot out of the oven.

Porous chorus chard - Mild leafy vegetable, with tall curly leaves full of holes like Swiss cheese. On windy days a row of this chard sounds off in four part harmony. Recently taken as the patron vegetable of glee clubs.

That year's garden journal also mentions some trouble with this last vegetable:

One row of the Porous, which we had within earshot of the monkmelon, sang nothing but "Glow little glowworm..." for three weeks. The melon was so sour we used it to make a mock lemonade. And the weeds got rather high for a bit as none of us could stand that whole side of the yard until the chard changed their tune.

Yet another note indicated a neighbor who complained that while her chard was porous enough (thanks to grasshoppers), she never heard it play any tunes. I wrote her a note with some helpful advice:

We found that our chard had to be taught to sing. Perhaps you and other friends/family could help by practicing hymns or barbershop quartet within earshot of the chard. This is liable to help in one of two ways - if the singing is good, your chard might at least take up the tunes (be carefuly what you sing in front of such impressionable plants) - if the singing is bad it might solve your grasshopper problem (they might all move to neighboring property since grasshoppers have such audio-sensitive knees).

Finally the garden journal concluded by saying:
I certainly hope no one ever takes this as commentary on any type of actual gardening. (Perhaps I should have said, "The characters in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual vegetables and fruits is not intentional.")