The Cucumbers Are Coming!
Yard long, pickling, lemon, and Slicemaster cucumbers
It’s that time of the year! The time when I really wish I had the book: “1001 ______ recipes”. Two years ago, it was zucchini. Last year, it was peppers. This year, perhaps thanks to my daughter “decorating” the flowers (AKA pollinating), I have all the cucumbers I could possibly want and more.
[Addendum: My prayer’s have been answered by Summerfest 2010!]
Some Chinese long beans have reached the top of my bean tunnel, and the gourds have reached the top of my teepee, but the cucumbers are definitely the current stars of my garden! I’ve got four kinds: lemon, yard-long (Armenian, I think), “Slicemaster” and pickling. The pickles were the first to start producing, but I don’t seem to be getting enough at once to really pickle them. Good thing you can eat them raw! Last week, my husband and I bought some more pickling cucumbers and made bread and butter pickles. I think they turned out pretty good, despite the incomplete recipe I had inherited from my Aunt Neva.
We’ve made yogurt cucumber sauce, salads with cucumber, fried cucumbers, and a cucumber salad with vinegar and mint (Thank you, Betty Crocker), and I’ve still got seven cucumbers in the fridge. Anyone have a great recipe to share?
Our tomatoes seem to be taking extra long this year, probably because of our cold spring, but I expect to harvest the first ones this week. The Pink Ponderosa tomato is loaded with green tomatoes and grew so huge that it fell down despite the five-foot cage I had attempted to contain it with. Now I know why serious tomato growers recommend sturdier cages! My two other tomato plants have plenty of (green) fruit, but seem a bit stunted. To be fair, I planted them about a month later, because they are less cold-tolerant.
See the plant in the back? It’s not supposed to lean over like that.
It’s not all about harvesting in our garden this July. We planted a dragonfruit tree we bought on a whim last week. I don’t know if it will survive in our clay soil or not, but I did attempt to amend it. If we want to actually have fruit, I guess we’ll have to buy another one. I also planted lettuce, green onions, and broccoli seeds. The temperatures have been so mild recently that I have some hope they’ll sprout. This is the first year I’ve had space in my garden in July (thanks to many seeds not sprouting in April), so I’m not sure how this will work out, but the Master Gardeners and the seed packets say it’s okay, so I’m trying it.
I’ll let you know how it works out.
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