News from Terra Firma Farm

Cucumbers: FYI
   Some of the hardest vegetables to grow, especially organically, are the ones people take most for granted. Cucumbers are a great example. Closely related to melons, cukes are one of the more finicky summer crops we grow. They are extremely intolerant of cold, highly susceptible to several common plant diseases, and a favorite food of two voracious and well-established insects appropriately named the Spotted and Striped Cucumber Beetles.
Yet with all these natural threats to the survival of cucumbers, humans provide the most significant impediment to growing them: specifically, Produce Buyers for large chain stores. This noxious pest species has for years declared that cucumbers must be perfectly green, perfectly straight, and have a round shape with smooth skin.
            Cucumber plants are vines that grows on the ground, much the way melons do. They are a fruiting body that gets longer as it grows, and anything it hits during this process causes it to bend. The part of the cuke that is sitting on the ground turns yellow. These are not "deformities". Yet every year, millions of cucumbers in the U.S. are left in the field because they don't look the way clerks in produce departments imagine they should.
Worse yet is the idea that fresh cucumbers should be fat, round, and smooth. Most people have eaten a pickle, also made from cucumbers, and know that they are curved, bumpy skinned and generally a bit "skinny" compared to supermarket cukes. This is not a difference between varieties (although there are specific varieties grown for pickling), but rather a difference in maturity: pickling cucumbers are harvested when slightly immature, when the seeds inside are still undeveloped and the skin is tender. Supermarket cucumbers -- fat, round, and smooth -- are overmature, seedy and often bitter.
Anyone who enjoys cucumbers, when given a taste test between an immature and an overmature example harvested from the same plant will choose the prior. In my opinion, cucumbers would be a much more popular vegetable if the produce brokers of the world figured this out. After many years of farming, I still don't understand the cosmetic standards.
In recent years, demand for better tasting cucumbers has led to a market for "European" or "English" cucumbers. These are a thinned skinned variety with fewer seeds than the standard "American" cucumber, but they are very straight and uniformly dark green. These cukes are usually grown in greenhouses, using a trellis system that allows them to hang freely in the air, where gravity and a lack of obstacles keeps them straight. (They are also often shrink-wrapped in plastic to keep them from drying out.) Sweet, thinned-skinned and seedless, these varieties of cucumbers are also generally incapable of surviving outside. For all these reasons, European cucumbers tend to be much more expensive than standard cukes.
            We don't grow cucumbers in greenhouses at Terra Firma. We grow them in our fields with melons and summer squash. So we were happy to discover a type of cucumber that grows vigorously when planted here, resists both pests and diseases, and produces tons of tasty, thin-skinned, almost seedless fruits. Called the "Painted Serpent", it is a type of Armenian cucumber, related more closely to Asian melons than standard cucumbers. A few years back we gave up growing standard cukes and now just plant these. cukes in the field

By normal cucumber standards, the Painted Serpents are pretty weird looking: striped light and dark green, they grow up to two feet long. Almost never straight, they are curved or even grow in a circle. These features make them easier to spot in the field then regular cukes, whose dark green fruits hide between dark green leaves. Faster harvest of bigger fruit makes them more cost efficient to grow. I think they are one of the coolest crops we grow, which seems pretty appropriate for a cucumber...