Cool As a Cucumber

Yeah, maybe not this year.

When I started this garden, I created a cucumber "trellis" out of some pieces of wire fencing and eight bamboo stakes.

Of the two varieties I planted that year (Sumter and Marketmore), Marketmore was by far my favorite.  Sumter is supposed to be good for pickling, but for the production, look and taste, I don't see any reason to plant anything other than Marketmore, unless you're making pickles.  If there's a better cucumber for this area, I can't imagine it.

I planted on the 23rd of April in 2014, and Sumter didn't germinate well.  I replanted it on the 12th of May.  We got some very heavy rains that evening, leaving water standing in pools.  The seeds did germinate, however, and I was able to harvest both varieties beginning the last week in June.  Sumter was a kind of blocky, squat fruit, while Marketmore tended to be longer and more smoothly cylindrical, and a darker green.

In 2015, I recreated the trellis but in a different plot.  I only planted Marketmore, and the plants grew lush with wild abandon.  (If cucumbers can be said to do wild abandon.) 

I planted on May 5 and harvested from the second week in July until the first week in September.  Harvest was good.  Very good.  I had cucumbers coming out of my ears, as the saying goes, and gave away many more than we ate.  I even supplied a town-wide dinner event in Blackwater.  (In the interest of full disclosure, that probably draws all of about 200 people.)

Since the vines were so lush, I sometimes missed picking fruit at its prime and ended up with lots that were really too big, but who cared?  I had plenty.

This year, because I had such an overabundance of cucumbers last year, I decided to plant more sparingly.  In yet a third plot, I erected a sandwich board trellis from two individual wooden ones my sister gave me.  I put a roll of wire fencing in the arch between them to give the newly sprouted vines something to get a start on.

I was expecting great things.  Boy, was I disappointed.

I planted on April 22 and began harvesting the first week of this month, July.  Today, I pulled the vines out.  

Harvest was very poor, with unhealthy vines and most of the fruit dying in infancy or dying and rotting within a few days.  It's been a wet, and very hot couple of months this year.  June is usually quite nice, and the heat starts building in July to some pretty stifling days in August and September.  This year, Hell arrived the first of June and has been with us ever since.  

Aside from the weather issue, which may have been enough to do the plants in by itself, as I looked back over that particular plot's history, I found that beets the previous year and okra the first had also done very poorly, both having been hit hard by a leaf spot disease.  But I'm not entirely certain there isn't a fungal disease in the soil in that plot.  Next year, I'm going to solarize that plot rather than planting it and see if that improves the chances for a crop of something in 2018.  

Also, when I pulled up the plants, there were gazillions of baby squash bugs and shield bugs (aka stink bugs) scurrying around.

I'm thinking it's not likely these were killing the vines on their own, but they could certainly have been enough to push a stressed plant over the top.  I had a look at the roots, and while they seemed healthy enough, they weren't very plentiful.  

And I did see what is apparently borer damage at the base of a couple of the vines.  That would definitely put the kibosh on them.

Since the vines are too leafy to check for vine borer damage in the stem bases, I'll try the vine borer trap method described in the Farmers Almanac.

While I don't like to indiscriminately kill things - even insects - I couldn't let all those little bugs go on living, since they would then be targeting what's left in the garden that they like: my tomatoes.  That just would not do, so I went for my "use only in case of an emergency" garden insect killer:  spinosad, a natural substance with insecticidal properties, under the label of Captain Jack's Deadbug.  How macho.

Spinosad  is a contact poison, meaning it has to get on the insect to kill it.  You can't spray the plant and expect the insect to die from ingesting spinosad.  It isn't touted to have a quick knock-down rate, allowing bugs to remain alive for a period, and presumably still eating, but I've found that - at least Captain Jack's formulation - knocks them down within a couple of minutes.  That could mean that Deadbug has another ingredient in it doing the knocking, but I don't see anything on its MSDS (safety data sheet) to indicate that.  Perhaps I just spray the heck out of it and overwhelm them.  It also works on insects you don't want to kill, such as bees, so you have to be specific about where and when you spray it.

As for people and pets, spinosad has a very low toxicity.  But don't drink it.  And yes, they do test these things on animals, I'm sorry to say, even dogs.

Interesting note from Captain Jack's:  

Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew® contains Spinosad (spin-OH-sid), a product first isolated from a naturally occurring soil dwelling bacterium that was collected on a Caribbean island from an abandoned rum distillery.

Here's a little video story about it, complete with kettle drum music.

I threw the old vines on a burn pile rather than my compost pile where the bugs would just reappear next year.  The Farmers Almanac says interplanting nasturtiums will help repel shield bugs, but I planted nasturtiums fairly thick on each side of my cucumber trellis, and while there were no bugs on them, you can see by the picture above they certainly weren't repelled from the area.  (I like to have a few nasturtiums in the garden because the flowers are edible and look so pretty on a salad.)

The Almanac also says to delay planting squash (and presumably cucumber since it's in the same plant family) until the early months of summer to avoid the bugs' favored timing (only one generation per year), and I think I will try that next year - or wait until at least the end of May. 

So, that's it for cucumbers this year.  There's really nothing like a fresh cucumber from the garden before it's been refrigerated.  When we were kids, we used to take a vegetable peeler and salt shaker to the garden cucumber patch.  I can still remember that as a summer treat.

Till next time.