Cucumbers

It’s cucumber time again :

Which means it’s time for bread & butter pickles. I’ve linked to Suburban Tomato‘s recipe here, because it’s the best one I’ve found. I do a couple of things differently: I fill the oven-heated jars with the cucumber/onion mix and pour the hot pickling liquid over, instead of adding the cucumbers to the pickling liquid on the stove and then bottling, and I add some finely sliced red capsicum for a bit of colour :

These are the first three jars of the season. Looking at the developing fruits on my plants, it seems there will be many more to come!

Note in the photo of the cucumbers above there are 2 different varieties. The 4 on the left are the standard supermarket variety with warty/prickly skins. The 2 on the right are smooth-skinned and a nice regular shape. It’s a variety called Diva and I’ve been growing it for a few years now. The seed came from Phoenix Seeds in Tasmania. It’s unusual in that the flowers are said not to need a male pollinator—they set fruit on their own without it.

There’s one thing I’ve noticed about cucumber plants. Like all curcurbits they have male and female flowers, but with pumpkins and zucchinis the flowers seem to only last for a day, whether pollination happens or not, whereas those on cucumbers stay open for longer, probably the females, at least until the flower is pollinated. I never hand-pollinate cucumber flowers (the sexual bits are so tiny anyway), and I always seem to get lots of fruit. I hand pollinate pumpkins and zucchinis and sometimes the fruit develops and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know what pollinates cucumbers—I never see any bees at them; let’s face it, I hand pollinate because there are less bees around in my area than there used to be. What I do have is lots of ants and tiny native flying things—wasps or hoverflies or something. Because I’m in a temperate climate I don’t have the tiny stingless native bees; I have the larger blue-banded bee, but it’s becoming rarer to see one of those. (Note to self: I must really get to and make an insect hotel).