The Tyranny of Cucumbers
Four months into the COVID era, my vegetable garden runneth over (kind of).
A few months ago, like many people for whom time at home was suddenly the rule rather than the exception, I planted a vegetable garden. In March, with sporadic help from homebound teenagers, I installed half a dozen raised beds, filled them with soil of dubious provenance (more on that later), planted the usual summer suspects (tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, zucchini, eggplants, melons); then enclosed everything with an eight-foot-tall deer-proof fence. Having had vegetable gardens before, I wasn’t too concerned about my ability to grow things, so actually the fence was the development I was most excited about, since it offered the possibility that, finally, I might feed actual members of my family, rather than the hordes of herbivores with which we share this part of the world. So imagine my dismay when, morning after morning, I went out to find one tender young seedling after another succumbing to some invisible scourge. First went the tomatoes, then the eggplants. The bell peppers went belly up, then the melons and most of the squash, leading me to the conclusion that the several hundred cubic feet of soil I had laboriously wheelbarrowed into my deer-proof vegetable fortress were, in fact, toxic. After three weeks the only things still looking healthy were the cucumbers and the beans, so every time a stand of something else keeled over and died I replaced it with … cucumbers and beans. You see where this is going.
Fast forward to July, and if cucumbers were legal tender I would be writing to you from the private Caribbean island to which my family and I have retreated to wait out the pandemic while counting our ill-grown gains. Instead I am at home trying to come up with creative ways to utilize the buckets of ripe cucumbers my vegetable kingdom produces on a daily basis. My first strategy was to deal with the abundance by making cucumbers the basis of every meal. Now, having tried every cucumber recipe on the Internet I’m here to tell you that no matter how he feels about salsas, salads, and tzatziki, man cannot live by cucumber alone. They’re notoriously difficult to incorporate as a breakfast food. Pickles, obviously; but we’ve got a pantry full of them now. Still they come. When I dump another basketful on the kitchen table the children roll their eyes; the dogs run and hide; even the chickens have started turning up their beaks.
What about the beans—the other crop apparently immune to whatever is wrong with my garden soil—I hear you ask? Sadly that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. I started both from seeds, not realizing what more successful vegetable gardeners already know which is that bean seeds and cucumber seeds look remarkably similar to one another. At some point I appear to have mixed up the two batches, so every time I replaced another stand of dying tomatoes with beans I was in fact planting … even more cucumbers!
Presumably, like this eternal COVID summer, the cucumber growing season will eventually run its course. In the meantime, you garden gurus, produce barterers and aspiring pickle magnates: send me your solutions, suggestions, pitches, and proposals. Until someone invents a cucumber-based coronavirus vaccine, I’m entertaining all options.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher