Cucumbers

It’s still snowing on and off here in what can only be described as a cruel joke from a climate that gave us 112 degree heat last June but decided to postpone the last frost until (hopefully) April this year. Luckily, we’ve been burned (well, actually frozen) before so we wait until May to put anything out that isn’t hardy enough to handle cold, hail, or torrential downpours.

But with an already short growing season, we decided to start cucumbers inside a few years ago. It’s not super recommended, as cucumbers don’t always like being transplanted, but here, the alternative is to plant them in late May and hope they grow enough to bear fruit before having the harvest cut short by an October frost. So I spent this morning planting cucumbers, pumpkins, and peppers in our seed starter trays.

I asked Forrest how many plants he wanted me to start, and he said 150, I think jokingly. But that pretty accurately represents how everyone in our family feels about garden cucumbers. When I began dating Forrest, one of the first things he told me about his family’s farm was how good the cucumbers tasted. On and on and on, he would talk about how much better they were than store cucumbers. I was skeptical at first, but he was right. There is something qualitatively different about a garden cucumber. I read somewhere once that the interior of a growing cucumber is significantly colder than the exterior., making the phrase “cool as a cucumber” literally true. Something about how they grow makes them more refreshing than they have any right to be.

Instead of the requested 150 plants, I seeded 20 plants our main garden and then another 50 for Forrest to do whatever he likes with. I figured if he gets tired of randomly planting cucumbers in every nook and cranny of our yard, we can throw the rest in pots and give them away. It’s time for the rest of the neighborhood to realize the uniquely halcyon joy that we’ve been selfishly keeping to ourselves.