Gather and Grow Friendship Garden: It's ALIVE!!!!!!

Recently the weather has been all over the map- super, ridiculously hot and humid followed by fall like cooler weather that has even required sweat shirts and sweat pants! The garden (in particular the watermelon and pumpkins) LOVED the week of super hot weather here in Iowa. Due to the plants soaking up the heat they have practically EXPLODED all over the garden. The thick vines starting intermingling, intertwining, and sprawling all over.

While that sounds pretty awesome the garden is thriving with life it quite frankly was getting detrimental to other plants in the garden. We couldn't see the peppers, had troubles finding the squash, the beans and peas were barely visible... it was bad. So, we did what anyone does when they are in deep and don't know what to do- call in backup!! Check out the photos below to see the "before"s and "after"s of the garden.

By the way- a big, HUGE extra special THANK YOU to Lori, the Master Gardener, who came to our rescue to get the vines diverted in different directions and to help us find the other plants that were being swallowed up by "vine monster"!!

From the far view it looks pretty normal. Lots of
green all over the place, but that just means
it's healthy!

How beautiful!

Watermelon or pumpkin? Hard to tell at this stage.

Roma tomatoes that are just waiting to get nice
and ripe! They will be red in no time!!

This is how Marissa (pictured) and Sarah (taking the photo)
looked while trying to figure out how to untangle the
web of vines. Conclusion we came to?
CALL IN REINFORCEMENTS!