Free Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

foraged in the garden bed, I leaned into the pen and offered the ducks the potato bugs. They softly prodded my open hand and snarfed them up one by one. Then they looked at me for more.
    I went back to the doomed watermelon area to hunt. As the ducks quacked and chortled at me and monitored my movements with great interest, I scratched the soil around the edge of the bed and found a roly-poly paradise, with bugs everywhere, in every size—from tiny ones the size of a speck of dirt to big ones the size of a cockroach.
    A faint glimmer of green made me halt my potato-bug harvest. Hidden under the dirt, seedlings had been growing. They looked like most melon sprouts do: rounded, kind of veiny. My watermelons had finally germinated.
    I crawled closer to the seedlings and inspected them in worshipful silence. Two were only half unfurled (the seed coat still hung on one of the leaves), another was a bit off to the side of the mound, a fourth was small and runty. One bruiser sat smack-dab in the middle of the pile. I swear I could hear it growing. Seeing the watermelon seedlings felt like finding money in the street: even though I had done the hard work to set the plant in motion, it still seemed like a miracle.
    When seeds germinate, an amazing thing happens. A seed is a ripened ovule, like a hen’s egg: it contains an embryo and a stored food supply. I watered the seeds every day because of a process called imbibition. When a seed soaks up water, its cells swell and mitochondria (the power stations of cells) become rehydrated and start to work. A cascade of proteins is made, the food-storage reservoirs are tapped, and slowly the cell wall softens. As cell division begins—set in motion by the rehydration process—a radicle bursts out of the seed coat and becomes the root of the plant. All this had finally happened to my Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon seeds.
    After an hour outside, I shooed the chicks and poults back into the cardboard box and took them upstairs. I could see the veiny leaves of the watermelon from our living room window. The process was in motion—all I had to do was give the plants regular water, perhaps side-dress with some compost, and hope my bees were up for pollinating a watermelon flower. I would soon be the proud eater of a homegrown, rare-breed watermelon. Nature had succeeded, despite the odds, again. Even in a plot next to the highway, germination is possible.

    The next morning, I stood in my lot and yelped. I threw the hose off to the side—I had been watering—and examined the crime scene. Half my watermelon seedlings were now stubs. My eyes trailed a jellyfish-like slime that ended at what was left of the baby melon plants. Chewed by slugs.
    Searching for the culprits in the sunlight, I dug around the moist areas where soil came in contact with wood, a slug’s favorite hiding spot. I found a few small ones. They looked—and felt—like pieces of gray snot. Now that I had them, I weighed my options. Some people suggest tossing slugs; that is, you just hurl them as far away from your garden as possible. I had my doubts that the greedy mollusks deserved a second chance, however slim, to slowly creep back from the street, dodging cars and boots, and snack once again on my delicate watermelon seedlings. Other people suggest drowning them in beer moats crafted out of tunafish cans. The slugs would fall into the moat and die a drunken, Janis Joplin-esque death. This seemed suspiciously close to buying the slugs a beer, which was more generous than I felt. So I dispatched them between my thumb and index finger. I offered their corpses to the ducks and the goose, but they didn’t seem interested.
    I knew there were more slugs—bigger slugs, the mothers and fathers of these babies I had just murdered—and I knew when to catch them. Later in the day, as the sun set, I drank a strong cup of tea and strapped on my headlamp. Prepared for hand-to-hand combat, I went slug hunting.
    I found them, lit up