Spring Planting (Or Replanting?)

Once we decided to do a garden this year, the decision on what to plant was left up to me with hubby's stamp of approval. Corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, watermelons - all standard Georgia garden fare. With the ground prepared and the seeds ready we set out the rows and off to the races we went. All the squashes, beans, peas, melons, in three short hours we had seeded an area more than 1000 square feet. Happy and pleased with a job well done, we headed off for our first week of waiting.

Anxiously I watched the weather report, glad when radar showed rain heading in our general direction. The weekend took forever to come around again. Sunday morning arrived at last and I bounced in the car like a kid on the way to see Santa. Just when I could wait no more, we turned down the street, up the long winding driveway, then past the garden. I could see little green shoots beginning to poke through as we headed to the main house.

Church seemed to drag that morning, and lunch was forever. Just when I thought I would burst from anticipation, we arrived back at the farm. Changing into work clothes I race out to my little slice of heaven to find...

Turnip greens. That's right, turnip greens popping up all over my nicely plotted garden.

Imagine my surprise. Covering the entire garden, in my neat straight rows and in between, anywhere there was a spare inch of fertilized earth, were little turnip green leaves. Apparently the previous fall, for a winter garden, one of the helpers on my father-in-law's farm had planted turnips, harvested the greens but left the turnips themselves in the ground. With the warmer weather and the fertile spring rains, those little suckers just popped right out, heedless to the fact they are winter crops that cannot survive the hot Georgia summers.

So my first full Sunday as a gardener was spent identifying and pulling little turnip greens while trying to not pull up actual seedlings that were wanted. This is when I discovered what a non-outdoors man I married. He couldn't identify weeds from plants, didn't like having to pull so many wrong plants, and within 45 minutes had abandoned me completely to sit on the front porch drinking ice tea while I sweat and pulled and cursed turnips with my every fiber.

I was not amused.