I have been meaning to make a raised bed garden for a while now. I even bought the poor little plants over a month ago. Even with daily waterings, those seedlings are crunchy and brown on the edges. I keep saying I’ll do it tomorrow, but as it is on a farm in the spring, time is an elusive commodity. We finally made time this past weekend though.

We found a way to make lemonade from the lemons life threw at us. A few days after we moved into our house on the farm, the septic system failed. It’s taken us a while to get everything in order, but we finally got it fixed. Anytime we dig anywhere around here we quickly find rocks. It’s like those cookies where they bet you can’t take a bite without finding a chocolate chip. You can’t dig here without at least one rock showing up in your shovel. All the digging that had to be done for the septic system left us with a large dirt patch speckled with good size rocks poking out from the orange clay. We couldn’t decide what material we wanted to use for our raised bed garden, but seeing all the square and rectangle rocks unearthed for our landscaping pleasure, our answer was clear.

First we cut the grass as low as we could, then we cut and laid out a square of a black poly ground cover. Then we put the rocks together, working the puzzle as best we could. We filled it up wth planting material and planted the poor sickly looking plants. I almost didn’t plant a few of them because they looked to be too far gone, but I figured a miracle can’t happen if you don’t do your part and believe.

Case in point, we have tried and tried to grow watermelons and have never been able to get anything bigger than a small nerf size football. Last year we gave up on the tiny green immature fruits and let them go back to the earth. This year when we prepared our garden spot, we prepared the entire area we intended to use, but didn’t plant it all right away. We still plan on going back and doing a few more rows of field peas and green beans. The weeds have gotten a little out of hand in the unplanted section–even with the hay mulch. We were over there pulling the biggest weeds when we found this little guy.

Or maybe I should say big guy. This is a surprise watermelon plant and it looks very healthy! All we can figure is that one of our tiny watermelons from last year that were left to rot must have had at least one tiny seed in it. Then that seed survived several passes of the sharp tiller blades. It somehow germinated and fought out the surrounding weeds for nutrients and already has the beginnings of fruits appearing.

So even though we had written off that little watermelon plant from last year, it hadn’t served it’s purpose yet. Lesson learned. Never give up, and always believe!