Clint & Barnacle
Gardening Is Good, Snakes Are Bad
Greetings from the island everyone. Hope all of you are doing well and enjoyed a great Father’s Day with dad this past Sunday. I called my dad, Henry, in Brazoria and had a nice conversation with him, the talk as usual turning to gardening and whatever planting/growing advice that I can get. Even though I MIGHT hold a slight edge in melon growing over the old guy, my goal is one day to be as accomplished a gardener as he is.
Speaking of gardening, it is in full swing for me out here on the island right now. Several different varieties of tomatoes I’m trying, Campari and Tycoon (developed by Texas A&M), are doing very well. A good friend, Kimberly Bennett, told me about a delicious store bought tomato that she and her husband found, the Campari. She just raved about this golf ball size tomato, so I finally found some seeds on EBay and gave it a try. This variety is a hybrid (cross between two tomatoes), so saving and planting the seeds from a tomato you buy at the store does not guarantee the same quality results when you grow it. It’s a complicated genetic equation, one of which I don’t fully understand, but I always just purchase my seeds for any hybrid fruit or vegetable. It’s a very small price to pay for better results. Anyway, several of the Campari are just beginning to ripen, so I’ll soon know if the effort was successful.
The watermelons and cantaloupes are doing only fair this year, even though I do have a few nice watermelons and one HUGE (25” in circumference), cantaloupe right now. It appears that I’m having a problem with pollination on my melon plants this season. Unlike tomatoes, which are self-pollinating (having both male and female parts), melons basically require bees to transfer pollen from the male to female flowers. The male flowers outnumber the females about 7 to 1, and the female blooms are only open for one day, primarily in the morning. So if this pollination window is missed, no melon will develop and successfully grow to maturity. I’m trying to hand pollinate them myself, taking the male flower and rubbing it onto the open female flower, but bees/insects do a much better job.
So given this fact, next Spring I will take on yet another title out here, as beekeeper. I’m already researching the ins and outs of keeping honeybees, and will place one hive in my melon patch area. I really don’t care about harvesting the actual honey, even though I guess that I will, but only want them for melon pollination purposes. I’ll be looking for the most gentle and docile honeybees available, and will order a “package” of them, which is three pounds worth or approximately 10,000 bees. Always a project going on with me out here, always.
The chickens and kittens are doing just fine, all of them getting so big almost overnight it seems. The chickens have adapted to their move to the permanent pen/coop area, and the kittens are constantly getting into everything. Those little energy devils would make coffee nervous!
The one thing making me a little nervous this Spring and into Summer, is the unusually large number of rattlesnakes that are out. In the freezer waiting to be skinned right now are nine rattlers that either myself or other islanders have killed since February. Just last week at 9:30 p.m., I killed a 46” one on the front porch deck not twenty five feet from my front door! Now that’s way too close, especially at night when you wouldn’t expect to see them out. A bright flashlight is a MUST when walking around at night out here, and you just gotta be very careful and observant.
Well that’s it from the island for now, everyone take care and have a great day.
El Gordon Cantaloupe
Campari Tomatoes
