The Rural Voice, 1999-09, Page 62CUCUMBER DEADLINES
Cucumbers impose their own time schedule. They may
be small today but if you ignore them for a day or two
they grow out of control
By Anne Duke Judd
0111MIPIV-11 .44 41,,,a00. -
Cholesterol awareness reduces the
number to be eaten in sour cream.
Now they have to be sliced and
soaked for bread-and-butter pickles.
The onions and green peppers must
be cleaned and chopped, and
everything boiled in its fragrant bath
of vinegar, sugar and tumeric. Dills
are so much easier: popped whole
into their jars, right -sized cucumbers
bedded on pungent fronds of herb,
topped with a few grape leaves for
crispness..
Did you say you are supposed to
be creating crisp prose at the
keyboard today? You have dahlia
tubers to dig and store, lily bulbs to
divide and replant, new bulbs to
scatter under the trees for spring
colour. There will be frosted morning
glories to compost, turnips to pull,
roses to mulch.
Running just to keep up, you have
no time to jot notes for next year:
stake the cherry tomatoes earlier,
plant fewer cucumbers, and dig the
early potatoes before the mice find
them. In clay, potatoes have to be
lifted before fall rains; juggle that
with tomatoes so deep crimson you
hanktul as I am for an
T
abundant garden, I think this
country needs a calendar with
more daylight hours in October. We
could take them from November, a
month we hardly need anyway.
You know the situation: even in
years with early harvests, fall days
are squeezed as tight as canning jars
in a pressure cooker ... tomatoes,
corn, beans, and the never-ending
cucumbers. Home freezers may
shorten the kitchen time, but those
big white empty boxes have a way of
enticing the gardener to expand.
"Just an extra row of peas so we'll
have some to freeze," is so easy, to
say in May. "The first seeds didn't
sprout, so I'd better replant the
cucumbers." June's decision
backfires when a double crop matures
in September.
So what if the editor wants your
column submitted this day, a research
interview is arranged for a book in
the works, and the chainsaw parts
have to be fetched from town?
Cucumbers have their own deadlines
leave them to grow, and they
become too bulky for dills.
58 THE RURAL VOICE
know they will be overripe by the
time you slice them.
A firm belief in broccoli as an
investment (89 cents now, $2.49 in
March) requires a half-day of
washing,blanching and bagging. But
won't you be glad in February?
The woodpile demands
attention; cleaning the stove is
on your must -do list. Fall fairs,
fall weddings, harvest festivals and
markets fill the October page, while
November's has only numbered
squares. So why not move some
hours, let us have more time to deal
with the fields of corn and beans, the
mountains of squash and beets?
Surely the technology that makes
us aware of real time, virtual time,
and downtime could be applied to
this problem.
Caught between notebook and
baskets of cucumbers, the best I can
do is quote a colleague from the
Internet: Dates on this calendar are
closer than they appear.0
Anne Duke Judd is a frelance writer
and editor living near Port Elgin,
ON.