Cucumber ideas

[OakLeaf]

Mmmmm, that salsa looks good. But, another recipe that calls for more of something else, than cucumbers.

I'm going to call it the year of the Cucumis. I don't want to count my melons before they're ripe, but I'm closer to a successful melon crop this year than I've *ever* been in the past. Got five or six Charentais melons looking luscious, more small ones coming up. The vines are looking beautiful and healthy. Last year, cucumber beetles infected and killed all my melon vines before they even flowered.

I don't have a juicer at the moment, but I should make more vegetable smoothies - with their water content cukes would be a great base. DH doesn't eat pickles at all, so I'm just doing my lacto fermentation in quart jars, one batch at a time (and pickling eggs in the brine after I finish a jar of pickles, yum!).

Really bright side about making all these pickles - I have trouble getting enough salt from food and wind up either drinking lots of factory-made electrolyte beverages, craving pizza and chips, or both. (I know I could mix my own electrolyte mix, but it always tastes funky to me.) Pickles are plenty palatable to me AND plenty salty! Yay.


Come to think of it, maybe it should just be the year of the cucurbitaceae. This is the first year I covered my plants until they flowered - hopefully to repel vine borers - and, touch wood, I've had one borer hole (addressed, and the young plant survived), and seen only a handful of squash bugs. Those two pests between them typically devastate my Cucurbitae. Now granted the winter squash are far from mature, but I've got the biggest Blue Ballet (miniature hubbard) squash I've ever grown - the plants rarely survive long enough to even produce, usually I plant them just to draw pests from the butternuts - the butternut squashes are freakin' ENORMOUS - and the zucchini are doing what zucchini do best, going from pencil to ball bat in ten minutes flat ... Must've been something about the winter or spring weather that's kept the pests down so well, because my garden hygiene is, shall we say lackadaisical, and while I did do some things differently in hopes of keeping the pests down, it can't possibly account for the drop from awful infestation last year, to just a few individuals this year ...