The final fate of my watermelon plant

So all summer I was super excited about my watermelon plant.

I bought it just before everything got too hot and its tiny little leg of a vine was so innocent looking along my fence line. Turns out that tiny vine got the best of me during the heat of July and I wasn't able to keep up with trimming it down. Then all the flowers turned to fruit and I just couldn't bear to pull the two largest off. This meant that the tangle of vines would just have to stay tangled because I didn't want to trim and accidentally cut off my precious fruit too. I let them grow and grow and grow and one just sorta exploded on its own from being so full. But, I ate it deliciously.

I figured this meant the other three that fruited at the same time as this one would also be ripe, but unfortunately, I was wrong. Only one was perfect. Thinking this would be the last of my melons, I just let the thing go about its life growing and growing. Then I noticed it had started to fruit again. When I looked closely there were seven different melons growing so, as I have heard you are supposed to do, I picked four and plucked off the rest. It was still mid-summer with plenty of hot growing weather. I figured they would be just ripe when the weather would start changing and didn't worry too much about the plant until then. Or so I had intended. 

A few days before the end of August, the forest next door must have gotten too big again so a  city worker came to plow it down. I figured it was a great time to pull all the extra tendrils back from the city property and get rid of the weird half of my plant. That is when I discovered seven melons were growing, plus three more the city worker tossed over. He had plowed over one of them. I finished tidying up the vines making sure none were on the city property anymore and went inside with my spoils. Four of the ten melons from that day seemed ripe enough to eat. We dug into one right away.

When I went back out, however, my watermelon plant was in ruins. The few melons left on the vine were worthless because the worker had pulled all the vines off of our fence and tossed them onto our property, breaking the vines in the process. I was a bit sad and disappointed that the watermelon plant met such a dastardly end. However, I was very glad about all it gave and am excited to try again next summer, perhaps along a different fence or maybe on a trellis to keep it contained.