2:05 PM Thu, Jul 12, 2007 | Permalink
Karen Bordeleau  Email
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I don't know about you, but whenever we plant 8 cucumber plants, none of them make it very far in the growing cycle without getting eaten by a woodchuck, attacked by some fungus, or just shriveling up.
However, whenever we double that number, we can expect that all 16 will thrive and I'll have enough cucumbers to feed a small country.
That's where we are this year.
Click photo to enlarge it.
My husband Dave recently staked the plants so that they will stay off the ground and grow upwards. He set up an L-shaped "trellis" of wooden stakes and crisscrossed twine. To accomplish this, he tied twine across and around the bottoms of all the stakes. Then he repeated the same procedure along the tops of all the stakes. Finally, he crisscrossed the twine through the middle so that the plants have something to grab onto as they grow.
There are lots of tiny little flowers with tiny little cukes on those vines.
Pickling recipes, anyone?
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At the URI Master Gardener Demonstration Vegetable garden we have found that wide-spaced netting (the holes are about 4 inches square) works very well and is easy to erect. This stuff is made of a synthetic material and can be used year after year. Available in gardening catalogs and some garden centers.
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Where there's cukes, there's gotta be dill. The dill that I planted years ago plagues me now. It's coming up through everything, especially through my lavender. They must be good companions in the plant world.
Back to the point. For recipes, I ALWAYS go to my Ball Jar recipe book, which has a great recipe for dill pickles. I use it every year and people rave about the pickles. I make pickled beets using their recipe, too, in October that friends and family wait patiently 11 weeks for as the beets pickle in the jars. I give them away as Christmas gifts. I found a link to get
that book here.
You'll never want to lend it out.
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How do you water under that black plastic?
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Maybe there is no need to water. I am constantly amazed at the amount of water some of my neighbors dump on their yards. I do practically zero watering and you'd need a microscope to tell the difference between our yards in terms of greenness except when we have a real heat wave, and then my yard bounces back afterwards.
Maybe the black plastic acts as a mulch. Although, I have to say, I prefer organic mulches. Something about plastic just seems the opposite to me of what gardens are all about. I was reading a few days ago that regular plastic will still be in landfills hundreds of thousands of years from now. Is this plastic more biodegradable?
Thinly sliced cukes, 1/8 inch thick, with a thin salad dressing make a nice salad by themselves. By thin, I'm trying to say not Thousand Island but more like oil and vinegar and a few spices.
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We water only at the base of each plant using a hose. This saves water because we're not applying it to the whole garden area, only to where it's needed.
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