Next year: The volunteer garden

Once again, I was searching my home office for something I had put away in its rightful location. (Why is it that you can leave something laying around for months, only to finally put the item away but then you can't remember the next day where that proper location is?)

But I digress...

So, during this fruitless search, I come across what I'll call my "picture of good intentions." In other words, I had found a piece of paper covered with the layout of this summer's garden. All the rows of beets were clearly drawn, the tomato plants were evenly spaced across the paper, the mounds of cucumbers could easily be discerned. And nowhere on that page, not between any of the rows, plants or seeds, was there a weed to be seen.

According to the diagram in my hand, my garden should be the picture of perfect health. But one glance at my back yard and most people would not think "What a nice garden." Their first thought would likely be, "Why are you letting those weeds grow taller than your outhouse in that part of the lawn?" closely followed by, "Why did you bother to fence in all those tall weeds?"

As many people might recall, I spend a small fortune every spring with the intention of creating a masterful garden. Those intentions were quickly left by the side of the road this summer and the weeds took over.

I have resorted to my familiar attitude about the garden: Surprise and glee when I find something living and thriving.

For example, this week I found three bell peppers intact. That is three more bell peppers than I was planning on finding.

I am practically giddy when I spot the tell-tale redness of a ripened tomato.

And I'm can barely control myself as I wait for the just right time to dig up my lone sweet potato plant which survived the past several months.

It is hard to walk past my overgrown garden, knowing how much time and money I spent in hopes of just a few jars of salsa and a couple bags of corn.

Ironically, my best plants have sprung up in my yard in the form of a volunteer garden. My front lawn is covered with crawling vines of watermelons, pumpkins and cantaloupes.

I'm presuming my children stood on the patio, spitting watermelon seeds on the front lawn. As for the pumpkins, they are growing in the exact spot where I let last year's pumpkins sit and rot until well into the winter before disposing of them into the compost pile.

I'm still trying to figure out how the cantaloupe ended up in the front yard. The only theory so far is that some small child, who doesn't like cantaloupe, slyly disposed of his fruit off the deck and into the yard.

I've already abandoned any thoughts of a carefully planned garden next spring.

Instead, I'll rely on the process that worked this year: Ignore the plants because they seem to do all right without my interference and be happy with whatever comes up.

***

If your garden hasn't taken up all your time and you're in need of some exercise, head to Barnett Park, south of McCook.

It takes some searching but if you look around, there are orange lines painted across the grass, around the trees and across the roads. While these lines were presumably drawn for the McCook Junior Varsity cross country meet this past week, they are entertaining for everyone.

My children stumbled across the orange lines because they run right through the middle of the playground. Soon, my kids were following the lines around a couple of trees, alongside the river and up and down the hills. They were even able to practice their letters and numbers when they found the words "1 mile" in the grass, not something you find everyday written in the grass.

Driving past the park later in the week, I saw that my family was not the only one to find the lines enticing as I watched a dad follow his three young kids around a tree, up the hill and alongside the highway.

If you want a trial run on this cross-country course, do it soon. City workers may get in a mowing session one last time this fall, eliminating most traces of the course. But a more likely culprit of the path's demise will be the wind, since much of the paint crossed fallen leaves. One afternoon with strong winds and the marked trail will be blowing in the wind.

-- Ronda Graff didn't fret over the recent frost warnings since she was fairly confident her surviving plants in the garden would be well insulated by all the surrounding weeds.