We are the epicenter – how to eat rotting watermelons

There have been a bunch of aftershocks since the August 23rd earthquake. A number of them have been right on Twin Oaks property, one of them (only a 2.0) just a few hundred feet from Tupelo where i am now writing.

You can look at this a bunch of ways.  The dull scientific way is to say, “There is no significance to these locations, other than unpredictable geologic activity.”

The way i prefer to look at it is that Mother Earth is saying, “Hey, look over here at what these people are doing.  This is a way you can step out of your addictive, crazy relationship with money and materialism. You can have a highly flexible work life, you can grow and eat your own healthy food.  If the whole world lived in this cooperative way, consuming radically fewer resources than their affluent neighbors, you would have a real chance as a species.”

Part of this is about eating watermelons.  For reasons which are mysterious to me (but i have not asked around), we grow far more watermelons than we can eat in the harvest season.  This means for weeks and occasionally months after they are harvested we have them all around the commune.  We give some to our neighbors and friends, but we still have a bunch.  What happens with watermelons as they sit around for a while is they get mushy inside and less desirable.  But they don’t get mushy internally in a uniform way.

Watermelons tend to get mushy around the seeds first.  This means if you have a surplus of watermelons you need to cut them open and carve out the high intensity seed area and throw it away, so you get the better quality watermelon fruit.  If you don’t do this, when you bite it you would say to yourself, “This watermelon is mushy,” and then you would stop eating them altogether.  Part of  growing your own food is that you move away from the “is this apple perfect?” mindset and move into the “what pieces of this fruit can i enjoy?” world view.