Trial and error with cucumbers
I watched cucumber trellis growers online for several seasons with envy. What a brilliant way to save space in raised garden beds and make it look fancy! Finally, I was sold and decided to try it in my garden.
At first, the cucumber vines did precisely what they were supposed to do: They climbed. They crawled. They wound their adorable little tendrils right up the trellis in record time. I was overjoyed! When they flowered, and their tiny yellow flowers began to grow into teensy baby cucumbers, I almost wept with pride.
Learning curve
When my trellis leaned a bit with the weight of the baby cucumbers, I didn’t worry too much about it. I just reinforced it and thought about who I should invite over to see my beautiful addition. But soon after, I noticed the cucumbers weren’t growing as long as I expected. Instead, they were looking more like teardrops.
Not your average cucumbers
Huh. I double-checked the seed packet and noticed for the first time that they were pickling cucumbers, meant to stay small for making pickles. But they still shouldn’t have been round... something was amiss with my cucumbers.
Double huh. There has to be an easy solution, I thought. I’ll simply harvest the cucumbers before they go entirely round. But no matter how closely I watched those veggies, the baby cucumber went from too tiny to pick to the shape of an orange seemingly overnight.
Cucumber fail
Instead of a basket of long green vegetables, I had a bowl of round somethings that looked suspiciously like small, yellow watermelons, even though I didn’t plant a yellow variety of cucumbers. But a cucumber that looks like a softball has to taste the same as a regular cucumber, right?
Wrong, friends. They tasted bitter and terrible and not at all like delicious, crispy cucumbers. Plus, they were all seeds, which is my least favorite part. Whether it was drought, fluke, or grower’s error (a strong possibility), my first cucumber trellis experience was not worthy of social media.
Guess what also happens when your trellis is full of softball cucumbers? It may or may not bend the metal trellis toward the ground where at least your dogs are happy to snack on them.
Maybe next year...
You might wonder if I’ve been deterred from trying trellis cucumbers after last summer’s debacle, and the answer is of course not. I’ll be more careful about the type of cucumbers I grow, and I’ll be sure the trellis is better secured because as much as my dogs enjoyed them, the cucumbers gave them terrible gas. But a garden fail for me means an entertaining story, and that’s always a win!
In addition to her love of gardening, Jamie and her family love their animals, even when they eat too many cucumbers or knock over tray after tray of seedlings.
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