In Defense of Food
The Locavore's HandbookThis summer, I planted a few herbs in my apartment’s shared backyard along with a baby cucumber. The sage, basil, and chives are doing quite well despite the short hours of direct sunlight. The cucumber plant started out three inches tall with two small leaves and has grown at astronomical rates. Some days I would even find a tiny tendril in the morning and within just a few hours it had stretched across to the stake and twirled around in tight little spirals. Our plant is covered in flowers, but many of them are male.
I didn’t know that cucumbers were diclinous plants. Diclinous plants produce two different types of flowers within the same plant, and in the case of the cucumber, a disproportionate number of males. For every ten to twenty male flowers the cucumber plant makes, one female flower will grow. Because our plant is not too large, it only has two female flowers so far. We’ve got lots of pollen, but few pistils, ovaries, and eggs to turn that pollen into a juicy cucumber.
It’s taken a couple months, but finally one of the female flowers’ ovaries have swollen into a full-grown fruit. Because this is a Bush Pickle variety of cucumber, it’s shape is short and chubby. I wasn’t sure if it was ready for picking since it was a little wimpy on the end, but I figured it was quite thick on top already.
