Garden of weeds

Update on the fort: Daddy decided that the wood needed to be stained so that it would last longer so a son of some friends came and helped stain it. Daddy also put shutters in some of the windows to make it easier for Ramble and friends to play spy, etc.

Okay, for all you gardeners out there, can you name this plant that grew, without help, from my garden of weeds? I'll give you a hint, it's not a tomato even though the part of the veggie on the outside of the fence looks quite like a green tomato. Any guesses???

I've learned that I am definitely NOT a gardener. Dear Hubby built a very nice raised garden with a fence around it to keep out the rabbits that seem to multiply everytime you drive through the neighborhood. He even planted the garden for me. All I had to do was weed it. Not even water it since Mother Nature decided that it should rain almost every other day this summer. Did I get it weeded? Nope. It turned into a garden of weeds from which lettuce and cucumbers grew aplenty. We watched them growing, anticipating the joy of eating them when what should happen? Rabbits. We were eating breakfast one morning and I saw a baby rabbit nibbling grass around the outside of the garden. How cute they are as they hop around finding the juiciest and greenest shoots of grass. The next time I looked, it was nibbling lettuce on the INSIDE of the garden! Some how it had gotten through the fence and eaten every single head of lettuce in about 5 minutes! Nasty vermin! So, rabbits had eaten our lettuce but we still had cucumbers, right--wrong! The cucumbers we were waiting for finally turned green and we went out to pick them. Imagine our surprise when every cucumber had been half eaten by those pesky rabbits!

We also had a surprise on the side of the house. Some friends came to swim one day and asked us about the garden we had on the side of the house. What garden we asked? Why the one with the giant pumpkin growing (there was some debate at the time as to whether it was a pumpkin or a watermelon since it was still green). The one with large cucumbers already gone to seed since we had no clue that they had grown there. Now this is how gardening should work: After Halloween, take your old pumkin and set it at the side of the house to throw away next garbage day. Forget about said pumpkin. Pile up some dirt and mulch that needs to go to the dump. Add 1 old Christmas tree and maybe some cucumber seeds that blew away the day you planted all your starter plants in the spring and you have a cucumber and pumkin garden! Rabbits really don't like pumpkins but neighbor kids do so we are crossing our fingers that our pumpkin stays put until we get to harvest it since we labored so diligently to grow it in the first place.

I love it when the two of them can play with each other without one screaming 'MINE' and the other saying, 'It's not yours. You can play with this (which Raptor obviously doesn't want because she had the object in question first!).'