This weekend I harvested 3 cantaloupes from our garden. Two of them were squishy so I was anxious to crack this one open as it was super pungent. It isn’t the sweetest cantaloupe I have ever had, so I should have waited a few days to open it up. This picture was shot with my 50mm f/1.8 at ISO 100, F/4, 1/8 sec.
Carson Matthews
As we have been fighting off the squirrels and chipmunks from the tomatoes in the back yard garden, our cantaloupe have been quietly getting sweeter. Today I was walking “Farm Matthews” and spotted a cantaloupe that had made the turn and turned slightly yellow. Based on advice from YouTube I pushed on the stem and it popped right off. It smells sweet and is barely soft to the touch, so we will wait until morning and call it breakfast!
Many years ago my friend and Atlanta home builder Stuart Grubb and I went and disassembled a play set in someones yard and reassembled it in my yard. Over the winter I convinced the boys that it was time to say goodbye to the play set and recover some of the back yard. In doing so I set out to build raised garden beds from the lumber. You can see the play set in the background of this picture.
It took a couple of tries to find the right combination, but I was able to come up with a prototype. Here is a picture of the first attempt… it wasn’t perfect so I broke it down and started over.
Here is what it looked like after redoing the side boards:
Not knowing exactly what kind of wood it was I did a lot of research and came up with a plan to make sure nothing was leaking into our food as it was growing. I sanded all of the surfaces, sealed it with MINWAX Helmsman Spar Urethane, and wrapped the interior surfaces of the wood with black landscaping plastic. Here is what they looked like once complete and filled with garden soil.
Once I had them all completed I planned out each garden with an online garden planner. Between Pike Nursery and Lowes I was able to get all of the fruits and vegetables I needed to complete my gardens.
Below are some pictures of the blooming fruits including tomatoes, blueberries, strawberries, and cantaloupe.
Now that the fruits are blooming I have installed a netting layer over the gardens to keep critters and other animals out.
This will be a fun year of gardening with hopes of supplying most of the ingredients for my daily smoothie. Keep posted as the garden continues to grow!
Carson Matthews
Carson Matthews Blog 