'Would you Mind Picking The Cucumbers?'

'Oh...no problem!...sure!'

True, everything in the garden is beautiful in the early morning. Last Thursday, I picked 68 cucumbers...plenty enough for our CSA members for Saturday. Of course, not everyone chose cucumbers, so there are still some lurking in a bin in the outside cooler.

Even so, no vegetable waits for man; you either go out there and take care of business, or you have giant useless cucumbers, and vines that are putting too much energy into perpetuating giant useless cucumbers. All I can say is...when picking anything...there's kind of a rule. Don't look down toward the end of the row!

It's WAY too daunting! Just keep to the chore at hand and eventually you'll get to the end. We have this plastic netting pulled along this fence. It has tiny little squares. I have 2 distinct cucumber-picking problems. (1) those pesky cukes who chose to grow THROUGH the netting - so half is on one side and half on the other - and the only way to get them out is to cut a hole in the fence. Then, of course, you have this weird cucumber cinched in the middle...but it has to come out (see giant useless cucumber statement above). (2) I only pick on one side of the fence, because on the other side are 10-foot tall sunflowers and there's not enough room in there for a person. Well, if you squeeze in there you could do it I guess, but as we all know, the underside of cucumber AND sunflower leaves are sticky and will scrape you! SO; my little snips, although pointed, cannot reach those growing on the backside of the fence. Again, I have to actually cut a square of fencing out to get through and cut the darn thing. Man, I sound like a whiner...but that's not it. I'm just giving you the lowdown on picking massive numbers of cucumbers. You do have to be pretty careful. As with other vegetables that continue to produce throughout the season, you don't want to damage the plants, so you have to work slowly and show some respect for the vines....

Now on to the new garden cart. Yes, we love it - it's big and black and rolls nicely and is light. I pulled it up one of the old strawberry rows as I picked. I thought I'd avoid the 'dragging of the 5-gallon bucket.' This was a good idea, conceptually. Toward the end of the row, I was wondering how on earth i was going to pull that cart with all those cucumbers in it out of the garden and on to the house. I want to say this about that: I don't care how cool your new garden cart is. NOTHING is light and easy to pull when you've got maybe 80 lbs of ANYTHING in it. I'm glad nobody else was here. I got that thing to the carport, but it was one baby step at a time! Oh, and P.S. guess what's in everybody's basket this Saturday?