Watermelon and Henna

This month I had two firsts.

I grew an actual, real, honest-to-god watermelon!  If you’re from somewhere with a different climate than mine, you’re probably wondering why that’s such a big deal.  If you live in my little part of the Pacific Northwest, you’ll understand.

Our summers here just don’t get warm enough, for long enough.  Every few years I succumb to the sweet little watermelon starts and buy a plant.  Every year it fails to produce a watermelon.

This year, I got this:

Now this is obviously not a huge watermelon, but it’s not supposed to be.  It weighed in at 3lbs, which is about right.  It’s a Yellow Doll Watermelon.  And when I cut it open, it was yellow as promised on the tag.

It’s actually more yellow in real life than in this pics.  It was also juicy and wonderful!  There was another, smaller one on the vine as well, and I was sure this one was too small to have developed.  Surprise!  It also was sweet and good.  I’ve saved some seeds and will grow this one again next year!

Second new thing: I put henna in my hair.  I’ve been wanting to try this for forever, but I was scared; partly by the tales of mess, and hair turning accidentally green or orange.

But it was fine.  Easy, in fact.

The henna itself is sticky, icky, green, and smelly.  It’s thick like mud.  I put the first glop in my hair and freaked a little out.  This is going to be a disaster, I thought.  I already regret it, I thought.  I’m never doing this again, I thought.

But then it became kind of fun, sticking that muddy goop in my hair and spreading it around.  I should have taken pictures!  Once my entire head was covered in thick green mud, I wrapped it in plastic wrap, and let it sit for four hours.  Then I washed it out, which was easy too.  I’d heard horror stories of it drying and sticking and being impossible, but that wasn’t the case.  Afterward, my hair was glossy, felt great to the touch, and is definitely red.  Since I have some grey in my hair, I got lots of wonderful highlights.

I’m definitely doing this again.  Perhaps I’ll experiment with a little Indigo added to the mix in order to get a darker shade….

I got my henna through http://www.mehandi.com/  which came highly recommended by those I asked.  They also sell tiny samples, so you can test the color on hair collected from your hairbrush.