We made a bumper crop of cucumbers this spring/summer in the garden. It was a cool snack to have between meals or in a salad as a side dish and ate more cucumbers this year than you could shake a stick at. We gave a bunch of them away and pickled the rest using the lacto-fermentation method. Although we still have about a gallon of those left, the inventory is quickly depleting. With that in mind, I planted a long row of them on the trellis that the sugar snap peas were growing on and they are coming on strong.
The cucumbers have blooms galore and if they set fruit, we'll have a spectacular fall cucumber harvest. I planted several varieties: Boston Pickling (my personal favorite), Marketmore, and Suyo Long. The Boston Pickling seeds were from some seed I had saved from 2015. Knowing that seeds 10 years old would have a poor germination percentage, I planted them real thick.
Lots of blooms on the plants and if you look closely, you can see that we've got some baby cucumbers!
But cucumbers aren't the only plants with blooms. Right to the north of the cucumber trellis, we've a row of yellow crookneck squash, zucchini squash and straightneck squash. We have a real battle on our hands with the squash borer. One day you'll have a healthy plant and the very next, it will have wilted and died due to this terrible pest. Even if we have a good bit of squash in the freezer, I want to put up plenty more. The blooms give me great hope that we can have phase two of the squash harvest.
We aren't the only ones happy with the blooms on the squash. A big, fat bumblebee was knee-deep in squash flower pollen as I snapped this photo.
If the Good Lord's willing, we'll see a maturation of fruit on both the cucumbers and squash and will enjoy a nice harvest!
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