My first cukes....

What a surprise. I was at the community garden doing a bit of watering and pushed some leaves aside, and lo and behold, this is what I was able to harvest for today....

The smallest is 3" long and the largest is 4 1/4" long. There are some other ones nearly ready for picking as well. Variety is Diament Pickling.

Together with the 2 Oregon Spring tomatoes I harvested from my home SFG yesterday, they'll go good with our meatloaf and mashed potatoes for super tonite.

Exciting! My cukes are all young plants. I think I planted them too late as the So Cal summer heat is just starting and tends to last through September. Very nice harvest. I am really excited to try making some pickles. I hope I have enough of them.

Me too, Chopper. There've been some pickle recipes on the board lately that I want to try and some I got last year. I love pickles.

I am starting to have cukes pile up in my fridge... plus a batch of fresh pickles! There are plenty more coming... Hopefully in the next week or two I will be able to try my hand at canning!

Me too! I just brought in 6 cukes today because they were getting too big. Those things really like to grow!
I'll have to try some home made pickles, cucumber sandwiches, cucumber salad, cucumbers a la mode...

I'm doing ok with my cukes, I planted just a pickling variety I put up 7 pints of bread and butters a few weeks back and I have almost enough to put up a batch of dills. My vines are slowing down, I wish they would put out more blooms. next year I will plant more, I only put in 8 plants.

Bad weather ect. ect. ect. my cuke plants are almost as big as some of your harvests!!




One plant out of seven seeds




Will summer last long enough for fruit?




Good thing I've got some crock pickles left over from last year! Is it too soon to start talking about how good next year is going to be?!

Hey, boffer, they live. A few weeks of intermitent sunshine and who knows. Checked your weather and it says sunny and hot for the next 10 days. Cross your fingers - might be a good time to fertilize.

Hey Chops,

The funny thing is...I'm an ignorant gardener. After this, my fifth year of SFG, I don't know squat about fertilizing, or much else, because that doesn't interest me. I have taken Mel at his word: I follow his soil making instructions; I stick stuff in the ground; it usually grows; and I have no complaints. I feel like Mel wrote his book just for me. He would have called it "Gardening for Dummies", but the title was already taken!

I'm facing a conundrum this summer: we have folks with decades worth of gardening experience, posting on the forum this year, who are having less than satisfactory results with the SFG system. I, who know little, am very satisfied with my SFG when the weather is decent. Why is that? Are my expectations less than theirs (that would be a bummer!) I don't know.

I love to eat veggies that I have grown, and I enjoy creating things to facilitate growing veggies. But the details of growing veggies is not all that interesting to me. That's why I appreciate SFG: I don't have to know much. Fertilize you say? Uh, OK, maybe fish emulsion?

Hey, boffer, I am no expert. I just thought a combo of new sun and new food might help. But I don't know. Were it I and I had money, I would go to the local store and see what the best all around organic veggie fertilizer was and get it. If I had to make my own concoction it would be blood and bone meal (you can buy them combined), fish emulsion, epsom salts (1T/gal) and maybe some ironite. I think that covers most of the bases for green growth, stem grown the flower/fruit growth. I am sure others might know better. I only offered because this year seemed such an anomoly you may want to cheat as much as possible.

I'm new this year to SFG and I had noticed that everything in my SFG beds really wasn't growing. of course I started thinking maybe the bags of compost I bought didn't have in it what they told me at the nursery Maybe I put to much of this not enough of that. So I had decided to use some type of fertilizer I never heard of fish emulsion until being on these forums. I went to my local nursery and found it since then I've used it twice (every 3 weeks) and everything has come alive.

Boffer....I feel for you, I really do. I'm so new at this, I glean info where I can. Last year was my first year and it was a disaster. My cukes...I think I got 2 wrinkled and mishappen ones from my 2 different plants. They were about a foot high by the end of season.
This year I played with a planting mix of my own, taking into account the needs of plants and info devised from both SFG, the book, Bob Thomson's New Victory Garden and Eliot Coleman's info on Maine gardening that works for him. It seems to be working because my cukes are healthy this year and I've had very little bug damage.
I added some composted manure to each box this spring, then as I planted each seedlings or square of seed, I added a cupful my own mix to the square. If it was a brassica, I also added an extra tablespoon of limestone to the hole.
Of course, weather makes a difference.
Last year we had rain, rain, rain, the end of June and for July, it was a deluge of the wet stuff. Many gardens in Maine were ruined. The organic gardener next to our comm garden lost over 400 tomato plants to late blight.
So weather makes a difference. Its been grand this year for us in Maine with more hot days than usual.
The other day I sprinkled some dried milk around my tomato plants to help stave off blossom end rot. This is a way to add more calcium to the soil, I read. I had found one with BER the day before. I hope it helps.
I hope the coming good weather you will be having does the trick for you.
Good luck. My fingers and toes are crossed for you.

All good thoughts.... but I wanna know why MsM is having her pickles "a la mode"

New seedlings?

Deborah.... dumb luck gardener with cukes very much like boff's (can you eat those harry leaves?)
Tuesday, July 27: Stunning tangerine sunrise, low morning clouds pushed away by warm south-west wind. Blue sky this afternoon. Highs in the mid 70's to 80

Lavender Debs wrote:All good thoughts.... but I wanna know why MsM is having her pickles "a la mode"

New seedlings?

That took me a minute-good one, Deb!

Thank you Sir B

These are my cukes (had to run snap a shot while the sun was still poking through the clouds)

Lemon Cucumber I gave up and bought these in June. I planned to thin them to one or two vines only keeping the first to blossom. I just don't want to thin out any survivors.

Oh my, actual blossoms?

These are Bush Cucumbers ...the third re-planting (the first two rotted from the rain) No blossoms yet.

Wow, I'm sooo jealous of all you folks already harvesting tomatoes and cukes and so...over here I have two cukes forming, they're now the size of my index finger, but with enough watering and a little sunshine they will get there... tomatoes are nowhere near getting red, but I know some will eventually... I have to be more patient, I know...
I hope I'll get to harvest zuchini too, but up until now the snails are eating all my flowers before they get the chance to get fertilized. Yesterday I picked up a fallen flower and there were 4 snails inside it, munching away... needless to say they ended up in a bucket of salty water... if there was a way to make money with snails, I'd be a millionaire by now...

LavDebs....I tried lemon cukes last year. That was one of the cukes that made it and I loved it. It looked just like a little lemon.
Mirjam...The cukes are starting to come now so be patient a little longer.
I got a few more over the last few days but we've been eating them as fast as I pick them. Mmmm good.