Pickles

I have a new favorite vegetable plant (technically it’s a fruit). It’s a pickle cucumber. A pickle cucumber, as you might have guessed, is a cucumber plant that produces pickle-sized cucumbers. Was that a Homer Simpson statement?

Now I’m not a great fan of cucumbers per se but I like pickles, and Meredith makes bread and butter pickles, dill pickles and sweet pickles, all of which I like.

As far as I can recall, this is the first time I’ve grown cucumbers. Meredith says I planted pickle cucumbers many years ago when we were first married but who the hell can remember that far back? That’s one advantage to having a leaky memory like mine. My life is continually full of new surprises even when I experienced them before.

There are two pretty simple reasons that pickle cucumbers have made it to my list of favorite vegetables: they grow well here and they produce abundantly. I have an eight foot row of cucumber plants, and each plant produces a half a dozen or so blooms a day. It takes only two or three days for a blossom to produce a pickle-sized cucumber. When these plants hit their swing in a few days I’m going to be up to my ass in cucumbers.

They grow so quickly that I have to harvest the plants every day, and it’s becoming a daily morning adventure. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how a cucumber plant grows, it’s a vining plant with large leaves. That makes hunting for cucumbers a challenge since the cucumbers hide under the leaves. Every morning I go down to my garden and crawl around in the cucumber patch looking for the day’s yield of pickles. Inevitably I miss one or two, and by the next day they are almost too big to use. Picking cucumbers may not sound like fun to you, but it’s a lot healthier than waking with a hangover and crawling around hunting for your keys.

I’m growing some other garden plants for the first time (as far as I can remember). They are winter squash, pumpkins and peanuts. I can’t say much about the peanuts other than the fact the seeds have produced small plants, and they are growing. I have to wait until the plants die at the end of the season to see if I get any peanuts.

Squash and pumpkin plants are impressively large, and their vines tend to spread in all directions. With their large leaves, they are the type of plant that makes a garden look like the real thing. Pumpkin plants are simply squash plants on steroids. Each pumpkin plant is three times the size of a squash plant.

My squash and pumpkins are doing very well. I already have quite a few baby acorn and crookneck squash ripening under the vines, and there are plenty of big yellow blooms on the plants.

It has become clear that I did not give the squash and pumpkin plants as much space in the garden as I should have. The squash plants are starting to grow into the corn and sweet potatoes, and the pumpkin plants want to take over their end of the garden. Every day I go down and redirect vines away from the neighboring vegetables but I think it’s a losing battle.

By the time this year’s garden is done I’ll have a pretty good idea of what vegetables grow well here and how much of each type of vegetable I should grow. Once I get the proportions right that should free up extra space in the garden in future years for my experiments. There are a number of vegetables that I would like to try to grow if only for the hell of it.

Now some of you are going to read this post and say, “What the hell? He’s writing about cucumbers, squash and pumpkins?” But that illustrates a point about being retired and living in a rural area like Fannin County. When you’re retired you have the time to savor the small things which is a good thing since life in country is leisurely and generally consists of small things. You’ve got to admit that watching the vegetable garden grow is better than watching the grass grow and at least marginally more interesting.

Besides, what are you complaining about? You’re the one who chose to read a blog written by a retired lawyer who moved to the sticks. What did you expect—a Bigfoot sighting or UFO abduction every week? Rural America is not exactly a hotbed of activity, and Fannin County is no exception. This is a place where family reunions are page two news and the sports page covers the middle school basketball team.

If you’re looking to read about constant excitement, danger and adventure go find a blog written by someone who retired and moved to inner city Chicago, Detroit or Baltimore. Oh, wait. People don’t do that, do they? I think there’s a significant point buried in all this, but I’ll let you figure it out.

Well, that’s it from Old MacYacavone. I think I’ll go pick some pickles and then give serious thought to taking a nap.