It’s funny how things sneak up you. For instance, for the past week I’ve been noticing a strange thing about the cucumbers, and have found more than a few tiny cukes withering on the vine, pale yellow and sickly when they had been a vibrant green when they had appeared as the first non-pea, non-bean items in the garden. The peas and beans don’t seem to care about anything that’s going on, pumping out fruits as fast as we can pick them.

The cukes, on the other hand, after a slowish start, have begun to take over, climbing up the trellises, into the cabbages and the microsprinklers, attempting to strangle both, reaching over a three foot gap to attach to yet another cucumber, and then both heading over another three foot gap to the garden fence itself.

Still, I fretted over the baby cukes. The people who come in and out of this house like fresh cukes plain, in a sour cream and dill sauce, as pickles, in salads, and so on. It simply would not do to have a bunch of wimpy cucumber plants refusing to yield to the mammals at the top of the food chain. Today, while feeding the corn some tasy (stinky) high nitrogen, all natural food, I worked my way over toward the cukes and started pulling up more grass (thanks, neighbor, for having your yard guy heavily overseed on some of the windiest days ever!). And discovered what I’d missed while looking a bit too closely at the tiny, failing cukes instead of looking at the larger picture and writing off those tiny failures as test balloons, of a sort.

Over four pounds of cucumbers this  morning. Note to self: stay on top of the hunt for these things so the gigantic, behemoth cukes are picked before they are gigantic, behemoth cukes.