331 Cucumber Starting and Training Tips

Show Transcript

331 TRANSCRIPT Cucumber Starting & Training

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by SmartPots, the original lightweight, long -lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit smartpots .com slash Fred for more information and a special discount. That's smartpots.com/Fred.

Farmer Fred

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot.

Farmer Fred

Mid to late spring is cucumber planting time in most of North America, and we have more cucumber growing tips for you today. We covered a lot of cucumber growing basics back in episode 266 last May, but today, cucumber cheerleader and America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower, has more cucumber planting advice for you, whether you start cucumbers from seed or from nursery-purchased transplants.

And by the way, choose carefully if you're shopping for cucumber plants. Debbie will tell us what to look for. Plus, properly training the growth of your cucumbers can help thwart a lot of disease and pest problems as well. Debbie tells us how. It's all in episode 331 of today's Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, Cucumbers, Starting and Training.

We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon jungle in suburban Purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by SmartPots and heirloomroses.com. Let's go!

CUCUMBER STARTING AND TRAINING, PT. 1

Farmer Fred

It came as a surprise to me when I discovered that one of the most popular episodes we played last year was one about growing cucumbers. Now, my wife and I are not that fond of cucumbers, so kind of  leave it to those who do like cucumbers. Well, you know who likes cucumbers? That same person who talked to us last year about growing cucumbers, and she is back. And that would be America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower, right here, old cucumber breath.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, that's me, all right.

Farmer Fred

With more advice on growing cucumbers, including starting and training cucumbers. And I'm wondering, based on conversations we've had in the past, whether it's better to buy the varieties already started in pots at nurseries or start them from seed?

Debbie Flower

Oh, I'm a big direct seeder. Start them from seed right where you want them to grow. Let those roots get established in the soil where they're going to live. They don't seem to do well being transplanted. And if they're too old, too big in the pot, they'll never form flower and fruit. And it's so cheap to buy a packet of seeds, for like three or four bucks. You can get the cucumbers you need for this year, store it and get some more next year. So I'm definitely one for starting them directly from seed. The thing to be aware of is they need very warm soil to grow from seed. If you put them out in the soil, it's too cold below 50 degrees, then they'll rot. And you'll go to dig to see what's going on with the seed. There's nothing there, because it's been consumed by microorganisms in the soil. So you definitely need to wait for the soil to be a minimum of 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Farmer Fred

And it depends what part of the yard it might be in, the nature of that soil, is it usually wet, is it usually dry? And nighttime temperatures play a part too, and that might be one of the better barometers for determining soil temperature. You don't have a soil thermometer? Wait until the nights are steadily over 50 degrees.

Debbie Flower

Right. That's an excellent way to tell what the average soil temperature is where you live, is to look at lowest temperature at night and that will reflect or is because the soil is that temperature.

So I totally support starting them from seed. Know where you're gonna grow them. They need full sun. So you have to have a place to have full sun and well -drained soil. No puddling there. And some organic matter in the soil. You can grow them in clay. You can grow a lot of things in clay, but you better have, or at least have some organic material in the soil. And over time, that organic material will become incorporated into the clay and you'll have improved soil. Watering clay soil correctly is a whole other story. So just be aware that you're going to have to pay attention to that.

Farmer Fred

Whenever I'm thinking of this family, the Cucurbit family, I think about planting squash seeds or pumpkin seeds. And usually the advice on planting those seeds is to plant them on a mound in very rich soil, usually manure added to the soil. Some sort of really just nice, nice stuff. But the raised mound is for better drainage.  Is that true with cucumbers?

Debbie Flower

It can be, depends on your soil. If you have really nice well draining soil, sandy soil. I was surprised when I was doing some gardening work at my son's house in Minnesota. Where he lived, he had sandy soil. If you live near a body of water, you'll probably have sandy soil. So if you have sandy soil that drains well, then it's warm enough so you don't have the puddling of water that can be a problem with cucumbers. In that case, you're probably going to have a lack of nutrients. And so that's where the manure would come in. Composted chicken manure is an excellent thing to add to soil to add some nutrition that is needed by these kinds of plants. They're pretty fast growers, so you need to keep that nutrition going. So not just amend the soil once and let them grow, but come back and add things like mulch that's made of some high nutrient stuff like freshly made hot compost or more chicken manure and fertilizing with preferably low analysis organic fertilizers like fish emulsion. Low analysis means that the three numbers on the front of the container, which tell you the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, are very low. Definitely not double digit, but single digit. If you have some of that fertilizer that has a high analysis, 16-16-16 or 10-10-10, you can dilute it more, meaning put on less than the label says so that you're not shocking the plant into growing too fast. Plants in that family that grow really fast will become infested with sucking insects like aphids because they put on so much vegetation very quickly. They don't, when a leaf first comes out of the bud, it isn't protected with the waxy coating that it will ultimately get. And so if the plant is constantly putting on new leaves, the waxy coating takes more time to come along. That's the protection from those insects. And so all of a sudden you're going to have a tremendous population of sucking insects.

Farmer Fred

Yes, fertilize, but not too much all at once. Do you trellis your cucumbers?

Debbie Flower

I do. I want to keep them off the ground. They can rot pretty easily if they're touching the ground. I don't mulch with plastic. If you're into mulching with plastic, then that will help somewhat. However, if there's water on top of the plastic, it's not going to solve that problem. You're gonna have puddles that the fruit is potentially sitting in. Also, I think it's easier to harvest and it's easier to see them. So the cattle panel curved into a circle makes a great trellis for many things, cucumbers included, because it's got a four inch by four inch openings in it. You can get your hand in there and reach the fruit. When you harvest a cucumber, you want to cut the fruit off of the vine, not twist it off. Twisting can wreck the plant.  That's important to remember, is to clip the fruit off.  And there are bush cucumbers. If you only have a small amount of space or are doing container gardening, let's say in wine barrels, then you would want a smaller plant so it doesn't become root bound in that container. And bush cucumbers, you don't need to trellis. You can put a trellis around them. I have cats in my neighborhood and I tend to put some sort of structure around a lot of plants so that the cats don't make them their own, let's say. So you're going to give, you have to give the plants space. They get to be quite large. Feet. Look at the seed packet. It's going to tell you what kind of spacing. three feet by four feet, I think is a good spacing for cucumbers. Seed packets often say plant one every two inches, in rows that are three feet apart and then come back and pull out a whole bunch of other ones.

Farmer Fred

That seems cruel.

Debbie Flower

I agree. I don't like that method.

Farmer Fred

Let's talk about that, because that's a good point. Pulling out as opposed to clipping.

Debbie Flower

Oh yeah, you shouldn't pull out. Yeah, if you're pulling it out, you're disturbing roots of the other plants around it. The roots are going to grow among each other. So if you do have to thin, you want to do it with scissors. Cut off the ones you don't want. If I have fresh seed in a new packet, by law, it has to have about a 90 % germination rate or it has to say on the packet what the germination is. So, I expect all those seeds to germinate. If I want to do the circle, as you mentioned, on a high spot, that's fine. I don't do that. I line my cucumbers up and put the trellis behind them. Or I do them separately and trellis each individual plant. But you could do both. You could do both, right. You have some freedom in how you want to do that. But they need space.

Farmer Fred

If you're doing it on a circle, that circle needs to be probably three feet across. It doesn't have to be real high, maybe six inches at the most, but it has to be wide so that the plants can spread out. We were talking a few months ago with Diane Blazek of the National Garden Bureau, and they had just awarded their Green Thumb Award plants for 2024. And one was a cucumber houseplant. It was called the Quick Snack Cucumber.

It gets 15 to 20 inches wide and 20 to 24 inches tall, and you could grow it indoors. It'd have to be a real sunny window, I would think. But basically, they're pushing it as not only something you can eat, but something you could use as a houseplant.

Debbie Flower

That's pretty amazing.  And so something that comes to mind when you're talking about growing inside is how does the fruit get pollinated? And what I'm seeing in this description, it's something called a parthenocarpic variety. Parthenocarpic is a plant that sets fruit without having to have a pollinator visit it. Think of naval oranges. We're here, we live in orange country here in California, and naval oranges have no seeds in them, and that's because they're not visited by pollinators. The plant basically has a false pregnancy. It produces a baby without having mated with anybody. And so there are plants that will do that, and this parthenocarpic, Quick Snack cucumber is one of those. For those of us who grow regular cucumbers in the garden, we do need to think about pollination. The cucumber will have male flowers first, the big yellow sort of trumpet -shaped flowers, and the pollen is ripe in the morning, but it'll take a while, a week or two, before it starts, or longer, depending on the culture of the plant, before it starts producing female flowers. So when it starts to flower, go out and look at that flower, it'll be a yellow flower with a finger-like object sticking up in the middle and it's on that finger that the pollen forms. Now you know what a male flower looks like. Keep checking. You'll get a female flower eventually, it'll be the same yellow trumpet flower but when you look inside it's more like a, I think of it as a brain.

Farmer Fred

Not sexist at all. Go ahead.

Debbie Flower

Just because of what it looks like. It's like, anyway, it's not the finger. It's like a more flat -topped structure.

Farmer Fred

It looks more like somebody who thinks with a brain, not with a stem.

Debbie Flower

Well, nature only has so many shapes. So then, it's a morning job. I like to go out and find a male flower that's also opened on the same day and take it off, break it off the vine, peel off the petals and go over to the female flower and touch that central finger to the flat surface inside the female flower to transfer the pollen. If you have a very floriferous garden, meaning other things around that are in bloom that are attracting pollinators like bees, you may not have to do the pollination yourself. It is something that bees will do. But if you don't have a lot of bees around in your garden, then you will want to go out and do that yourself.

Farmer Fred

So do young cucumber plants have the same malady that young squash plants have, that there is incomplete pollination because of that? Because of squash plants, again, you got the male flowers and then come along the female flowers and they both have to be in sync and the temperatures have to be right for full pollination to happen. But in case of partial pollination, you end up with a fruit that doesn't get very long and kind of shrivels up and dies?

Debbie Flower

I don't think I've ever seen that due to lack of pollination. I imagine it could occur. I think but I know I have seen it due to irregular watering. It gets what is called blossom end rot in tomatoes where the it doesn't fully form. And watering is very critical with cucumbers. They have fairly shallow roots. They need very even watering but need to be in well-drained media. And so you want to mulch their root zone. And it's going to be wide. It's going to be wider than the plant. Don't get the mulch up against the stem, but have it spread out wide on all sides so that the soil does not dry out quickly.

Farmer Fred

All right. So you're talking cucumbers specifically, as opposed to the problems that squash might have.

Debbie Flower

Yes. Even though they're in the same family.  I have not seen it. I imagine it does occur, but I have never seen it on a cucumber.

Farmer Fred

It must be the variety you're growing.

Debbie Flower

I've grown different ones, but it could be a Straight 8 or Chelsea Prize, those are two that I've grown quite frequently, but I've grown others as well and I've never had the problem and you don't grow them. So I can't ask you.

Farmer Fred

True. Although I'd be curious to try to grow a Quick Snack in the house.  You don't get big cucumbers on this plant, by the way. It says here the fruit get about one and a half to two and a half inches long.

Debbie Flower

So they're pickling. They're gourmet. Well, they do sell them, you've seen them in the grocery store, those packets of cocktail size. Yeah. Or pickling size. If you want to pickle, you want to pick the fruit when it's pretty small. You get a better pickling one. Although I don't know if you remember going to the store and getting the big pickle out of the big container.

Farmer Fred

Was it a general store and you’re sitting around the cracker barrel?

Debbie Flower

It was the meat store my mother would go to. It always had a barrel of pickles. I like pickles. So there were dill pickles there, and we'd get one and it was huge, but enjoyed eating that. So you can pickle any size you want, but it's traditional for pickling cucumbers to be picked when they're between two and six inches long. Whereas slicing are usually bigger than that, seven to 10 inches long. If you're having bitter cucumbers, which can be a problem, the causes of that tend to be irregular watering or temperatures that get very cold. So keep track of that. And you want to cut the fruit off the vine rather than twisting it and then use them immediately or refrigerate without washing. Once you introduce water, then you're going to rot the cucumber.

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CUCUMBER STARTING AND TRAINING, Pt. 2

Farmer Fred

Let's get back to our conversation with Debbie Flower about cucumbers, especially bitter cucumbers.

And I am sure someone will write in this year, because they write in every year with the same question, about bitter cucumbers. What causes bitterness?

Debbie Flower

You aren't listening! I just said that.

Farmer Fred

Oh. Irregular watering. OK, all right.

Debbie Flower

And soil temperatures that are too cold. So that the latter would have to be happening at the end of the season if you suddenly got cold temperatures. Or in parts of the country I haven't lived in. You know, one day it's spring, one day it's summer, one day it's winter.

Farmer Fred

Let me rephrase the question. Since you brought up these things that can happen to cause bitterness, I've heard it said that if you just scrape off the ends, the skin, it'll remove a lot of the bitterness.

Debbie Flower

I've heard that and I've tried it and sometimes it seems to help and sometimes it doesn't. And I've heard of cutting off the stem ends. So the end that was attached to the plant and rubbing just like a half inch of the fruit and then rubbing that vigorously with the remaining piece of cucumber and some foam forms and supposedly that brings it out. I don't know that I believe that.

Farmer Fred

It says here, at the University of California, if you want to believe them.

Debbie Flower

We will.

Farmer Fred

They say about cucumbers, large temperature swings and shade can cause bitterness.

Debbie Flower

Okay. So.That's where that cold soil can come from. Yeah, and they don't thrive in very cool, foggy or windy locations. Right, so it's not a coastal crop around here. Right. Yeah. Unless you have a microclimate. Right. So you have that special one. Or grow it in a greenhouse.

Farmer Fred

Grow it in a greenhouse, yeah. You could do that too. Let's talk about some cucumber types. You mentioned a few varieties, but they have various uses.

Debbie Flower

I've seen round ones, and long ones and the vining ones. Hybrids, of course, might solve a lot of problems of cucumbers. Yes, prevent pest problems. Yeah. But you've got English and Persian, Armenian and Asian. Yeah, and I'm not well versed on them. The Armenians I grew, I didn't like at all. To me, they were somewhat dry. I like a nice, crisp, wet cucumber with a thinner skin. So for me, the Chelsea Prize.

Does that surprise you? You better watch. It can grow really, really huge fruit. I don't like the lemon cucumber. There are round ones and they turn yellow. They taste lemony and that's to me not what a cucumber tastes like. So personally, I don't like that. But they produce. They're quite prolific and I know many people do like them. There are some that are called burpless and they're supposed to have less of the compounds in them that cause humans to burp. Yes. What is that compound? I don't know. Yeah, I'm trying to think too.

Farmer Fred

It's not capsaicin.

Debbie Flower

No, that's, that's... Yeah.

Farmer Fred

Are snails and slugs a problem with cucumbers?

Debbie Flower

I have not had a problem with them, but the conditions where cucumbers grow are certainly something where slugs and snails would like to be. And that's another reason for the trellis too. Yes, get them up off the ground, right? I try to, before I plant, I try to bait for slugs and snails so that they're not there. Because slugs and snails can consume a baby plant pretty darn quickly. So I try to get rid of them before they occur.

Farmer Fred

How do you tell the difference between a cucumber beetle and a ladybug?

Debbie Flower

Well, isn't a cucumber beetle yellow?

Farmer Fred

Yeah.

Debbie Flower

And striped?

Farmer Fred

Sometimes.

Debbie Flower

And a lady beetle generally is orange with black spots.

Farmer Fred

They're not all that way. But striping is not a lady beetle. Doesn't the cucumber beetle have long antennae too?

Debbie Flower

Don't know.

Farmer Fred

Okay. I only mentioned that because Jeanne brought one into the house. Uh oh. And it was actually, it was two cucumber beetles mating on the back of a chard leaf. And I go, oh, I'm not worried about it. We don't grow cucumbers.

Debbie Flower

Yes, you're right. Cucumber beetles are yellow and they can be striped or spotted and they do have long antennae. Lady beetles do not have the long antennae. That'd be the way you tell them apart because they kind of look alike. Especially the spotted one. Yeah. Yeah.

Farmer Fred

That's the only trick question I had.

Debbie Flower

Well, I was looking up what causes the burping. However, you can deter cucumber beetles with row covers over newly planted cucumbers or seedlings, but you do want to remove the covers to allow bees to reach the vines when the plants start flowering.

Farmer Fred

Right. Cucurbitacin is the chemical in cucumbers that causes bitterness.

Debbie Flower

Yes, when I was having a procedure in the doctor's office without sedation, I was talking to the nurse.

And she asked me about squash beetles. Now, I didn't have my horticulture hat on, you know, I was doing something else.

Farmer Fred

You were in pain.

Debbie Flower

And I failed to say use floating row covers. Yes, you have to take them off once they start flowering or especially every morning because that's when the pollen is transferred. It's a morning job. But to keep away the cucumber beetles,  you can cover them back up for the afternoon if you're into that doing that amount of work. But the beetles can be prevented from getting to the plant if you completely cover the plant with floating row cover.

Farmer Fred

This reminds me of the time I had heart surgery.  Quadruple bypass heart surgery back in 2012.

Debbie Flower

You're talking without anesthesia, talking to the nurse.

Farmer Fred

Well, it was worse than that. It was like hours before the surgery. I think it was actually the afternoon before.

Debbie Flower

Oh, and you're nice and calm. Nothing's happening here.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, right. And then they want to shave your entire body with a dry razor. All right. I'm here. Go. No choice. Yeah. Well, all of a sudden, there's a crowd of nurses and doctors around me and they're asking garden questions. This is going on and I'm explaining how to build a raised bed.

Debbie Flower

And they probably think they're distracting you from what's happening. So you wouldn't worry about the dry razor.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, that's like, come on. But yeah.

Debbie Flower

So keep the weeds free down around these cucumbers because they don't like competition. You don't want the moisture to be taken away from the roots by the weeds. You don't want insects, bad guy insects to be trapped in the weeds either. So keep it weed free. A nice little bit of mulch helps with that. And really enjoy.

Farmer Fred

And do the more you pick, will you get more?

Debbie Flower

The general answer is yes. The plant's goal in life is to make seed. And if you mature seed, We eat them before those seeds are mature. If you wanted to save seed from your cucumber to grow some for the next year, you would have to leave it on the plant beyond the point where you would eat it. It would become dry and chewy. And then you would have seed in there that's viable, meaning it has life. Every time you take off a cucumber for eating when it's much smaller before those seeds are fully ripe, then the plant hasn't satisfied its mission in life, which is to make babies that will follow in its footsteps and grow so it has to make another fruit. Beans are like that, peas are like that, a lot of things we grow are like that.

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CUCUMBER STARTING AND TRAINING, PT. 3

Farmer Fred

We're talking cucumbers with America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower. And we're talking about cucumbers and cucumber diseases. I guess cucumbers are susceptible to verticillium wilt, so I would imagine in the world of hybrid Cubans, Not Cubans! In the world of hybrid cucumbers, there are verticillium wilt-resistant varieties.

Debbie Flower

Right, so those would generally be the hybrids and when you're looking at the seeds you look for the the big V. Big V, right, after it. All right. Whenever possible, do not plant cucumbers in Bermuda grass.

Farmer Fred

Thank you. Somebody felt they needed to tell you that.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, yeah they did. Whenever possible, select a location that is not heavily infested with weeds, especially weeds, such as field bindweed, nutsedge, and bermudagrass. Yeah, and the reason for that is bermudagrass, grasses in general, very densely rooted, and bermudagrass in particular has underground stems, aboveground stems, it will root anywhere it touches the ground, and so it's just totally taking up space in the soil that the cucumber needs to get its water and nutrients from.

Farmer Fred

Now for those who, for whatever reason, decide to buy the plant at the nursery and as you've advised,  you want to pick it before it has four true leaves on it.

Debbie Flower

Mm -hmm. Four would be the max I would go for.

Farmer Fred

OK, so maybe even two true leaves on it and you take it home. How deep can you bury that stem? I wouldn't bury it any further than it was in the pot. I might plant so the container media is maybe a quarter of an inch above the field soil and then I would mulch up to the container media, not over it.

Farmer Fred

University of California is on line one for you.

Debbie Flower

What do they say? You can bury it?

Farmer Fred

Yeah, they're saying, “mark where you want each plant and make the hole deep enough to bury the stem as far as the first leaf.”

Debbie Flower

Oh, really?

Farmer Fred

“Place the plant deep into the hole. Press the soil firmly around the plant and water thoroughly to remove any air pockets. If transplanting in the summer, shade the plants in the middle of the day for the first week or use a floating row cover.”

Debbie Flower

OK, see, I don't buy my cucumbers already germinated. So it was an issue I never faced. So that's good to know. That makes it actually easier to transplant those plants. If you can bury the stem, then they're very sturdy. And I love the comment about shade. I would do that for any plant I plant in a very sunny part of the year. I learned that in Nevada. I lived near Reno, Nevada and went to University of Nevada, Reno for, I don't know, a year and a half, I think. I accumulated 19 graduate credits and then they got rid of the program. So I finished at UC Davis. But I spoke to a woman who was known as a very knowledgeable local horticulturist. She liked all kinds of plants. And one thing she said is, when you first plant, give them shade. You have to understand, Nevada is the most droughty state in the nation. They get the least amount of rain of all the states in the US. So six inches is a good year in Nevada and the soil is crap In the Great Basin.

Farmer Fred

Can you spell caliche?

Debbie Flower

And it's often very salty. So there's a lot of challenges, but when you plant the plants, she saidto  give them shade. And that's when I started making little hats and such out of newspaper, or just using a clothes pin and making a structure, folding newspaper into a structure that I could just lay over the plant. Newspaper doesn't last very long when it's outdoors. It gets brittle and of course it decomposes. So if it gets away from me, it's okay. But the first couple of weeks, do that. And it gives the plant a chance to get the roots in growing healthfully into the soil before it's faced with a strong sun and lots of wind and losing lots of moisture out of the top of the plant.

Farmer Fred

I guess if you don't know which cucumber variety to choose, you could buy packets of seeds of various varieties based on the picture of the packet. Let's face it, we've all done that. But you may want to choose ones that are similar in growth habits. So you'd choose maybe five different packets. Really, this is for the cucumber heads out there.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, that's a lot of cucumbers. That's a lot of cucumbers.

Farmer Fred

But maybe all bush varieties or all vining, if you've got a trellis already set up. Something like that. Just so you don't have a mix in the same location of bush varieties and the trailing.

Debbie Flower

Or you put the trellis in the back, on the north side which would be the shadiest side of the garden and put the bushes in front.  But you got to space them. Make sure you got to have a way to walk between the bush plants and the trellised plants so you can get to them, tend them, fix the irrigation if it breaks down, whatever that is, and then have space for the bush varieties to spread out. I would give them four foot each all the way around and then another aisle.

Farmer Fred

So you'd plant them four feet apart?

Debbie Flower

I would. Okay.

Farmer Fred

I mean, some would say 24 inches, but I like more space.

Debbie Flower

I like more space too. Cucumbers get powdery mildew very commonly, and powdery mildew is a fungus and it's on the leaves and it can cover the leaves and cause reduced photosynthesis, reduced food production by the plant. And it happens when things are too crowded, when you trap moisture. And that happens when you plant too close together. So there are English cucumbers. English cucumbers tend to have very few to no seeds and be very long and thin and crisp. We often buy them at the grocery store. Sometimes they're wrapped in plastic. White cucumbers. I think, no, it was a yellow one we grew at school. And I tasted it and I like green cucumbers. It didn't have enough tang for me. So the flavor is going to be different. Persian. Small burpless cucumbers known for their easy digestibility and prized for their thin edible skin. Very few seeds, much like English cucumbers. That was not my, no, it was an Armenian I didn't like. Cucumber, not person. And garden cucumbers, often called slicers. That's the kind I like a lot. The lemon cucumbers are the round yellow ones I don't like because they do taste lemony. If you love lemon, you're going to like that cucumber. The lemon cucumber. Yes. Gherkins.

Farmer Fred

Isn't that gherkin a pickle?

Debbie Flower

They may be. Pickled baby cucumbers that have been allowed to ferment. So we're getting off the topic here. Here's the one. Armenian cucumbers. Kind of long and thin. Yard-longs, snake cucumbers, or snake melon. Right. They look and are supposed to taste like cucumber. But they're not. They are musk melons and that's probably why I didn't like it. I didn't expect the texture. It was more like a not quite ripe melon. And the flavor was not a cucumber. I didn't like the Armenian cucumber personally.

Farmer Fred

Is it a cucumber though? Or is it a musk melon?

Debbie Flower

It's a musk melon.

Farmer Fred

So it's a lie.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, they're living a lie. It's not a cucumber. So that was a common name problem, you know? Yes. So this is an article from fine dining lovers .com about types of cucumbers. And a cocktail cucumber…

Farmer Fred

What? Do you stir a martini with it or what?

Debbie Flower

You put it on your charcuterie board.

Farmer Fred

Oh, okay. Next to the martini.

Debbie Flower

Right.

Farmer Fred

Okay.. Now we know. We covered a lot about cucumbers. We did.  Thank you for your help on this.

Debbie Flower

You're welcome. I enjoyed it, Fred.

Farmer Fred

Stay burpless.

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Farmer Fred

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smell and touch all your plants. Enjoy the texture, the aromas, the color combinations, the structure. Admire the naturally amazing artwork of plant leaves. Check both sides of those leaves for eggs or insects. And if you're checking for eggs or bugs on your plant, make sure that they're the bad guys and not the good guys before you shoo them away. Take a seat out there. Watch and listen to the visitors to your yard, from insects to birds to four -footed creatures, some of whom may be of dubious benefit. And if you would, please: help spread the word to your gardening friends and family about the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. Leave a thumbs up or a comment on the show at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can do that at our homepage as well, gardenbasics.net.

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Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Tuesday and Friday. It's brought to you by SmartPots. It's Garden Basics available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast and transcripts of the podcast, visit our website, gardenbasics .net. And that's where you'll also find out about the free Garden Basics newsletter, Beyond the Garden Basics. And thank you so much for listening.