Attack of the Cucumbers

August 2011

THEY JUST KEEP COMING.


Cucumber husbandry is pretty easy, once you get the vines going. In the beginning, our sad little plants were attacked first by hail (crushed) and then aphids. At first the seeds were carefully selected for being 'burpless' among other attributes, and carefully labelled in the garden.

Well.

That didn't last long. We had several casualties, which resulted in us driving to Lowes and grabbing plants more or less at random from the shelves to transplant. So now I have no idea what's what, which is unfortunate for next year's planning, bc its basically back to square one.



We are growing our stuff organically, which usually means nasty smelling things like fish emulsion and blood meal sometimes litter our patio. But more than anything, I sometimes have vicious daydreams of buying the most chemical-rich insecticide that I can and just nuking every thing in there.

Our cucumbers were being decimated by aphids. For some reason, the idea of a multitude of tiny insects targeting my plant an sucking the life out of it fills me with an unholy rage. In the spirit of organics, we decided to head over to Calloway's and pick up a container of ladybugs to take care of our little problem.

Now, the package says they have a special food/bedding that makes them want to stay on your plants and not fly away. To this, I would like to say: Ha ha, you cretin.

They hung around for a little over 24 hours, but after that it was sayonara.

After trying a multitude of organic pest control options - Neem Oil, Orange oil, biological control (ladybugs), as well as companion plants, we finally found one that works great - Spinosad. If you have a garden, go get you some. Immediately.

Ninja cucumber hiding in the grass

Anyway, that brings us to now, and cucumber husbandry and proliferation.

After watching our cucumbers make little babies that promptly would turn yellow and fall off, I hit the internet.

Apparently, all the butterfly/bee friendly plants I've spread around the yard aren't doing their jobs, because I found out that they were all dropping off because they weren't being pollinated. So, guess how I spend a few mornings a week?



If you said, 'You crawl around hand-pollinating each flower with a tiny paintbrush' then you have come to understand the level of insanity I have stooped to regarding this garden.



So, really, it's my own fault that I have approximately a million inedible cucumbers.

Yes, you heard me right. Inedible. So imagine our faces as we lovingly sliced our first cucumber - so juicy and crisp, still warm from the sun – at put it into our mouths.

And promptly lunged for the sink so we could spit it out.

Turns out, extreme heat is not so good for cucumbers. The plant becomes ‘stressed’ much like you or I during tax season, and decides to punish us by becoming horribly bitter.

It’s awful. Yet I can’t stop pollinating the things. It's a possibility that I might have issues. One of them is that we have several different breeds (is this the right word?) of vines, and every now and then, one of them produces a cucumber that is edible. So, I can’t throw them away, because WHAT IF!? But on the other hand, the only way to tell is to taste-test them, and it is unpleasant. 

I usually approach this problem by placing them in the crisper, letting them get wrinkly, and then putting them in the compost pile. You’d be surprised how fast truly fresh produce goes bad.

So, I couldn’t help myself when my mom came over one day and I explained my problem to her. So we steeled ourselves, opened my crisper, and began to weed out the nasty ones.

This consisted on slicing off a piece, and tentatively touching my tongue to it. I know in about five seconds if it is nasty, and somehow it spreads to my entire mouth, making it feel powdery and locking up my jaw. I can't really describe it. To my everlasting entertainment, mom couldn’t quite grasp this process, and instead insisted on chewing up each piece. I blame her old-lady taste buds, because she could never tell right away. She’d have a bite and say, “This is good!” To which I would continue to stare at her until the nauseated expression came over her face and she would spit out her pieces quickly, to the sound of my gales of laughter.

In the end, only 2 cucumbers out of this bunch proved edible. Although the hilarity was almost worth all the work.

Apparently there are types of cucumbers that are bred to be 'non-bitter'. You can bet I will be getting those next year.