Sunday, April 05, 2009

show and tell




Well what have we here folks. The one (1) cucumber produced by the Sweet and Stripey cucumber plant. I had a disappointing harvest from the rarer cucumber varieties I bought from diggers but I have to say this one was a plate stopper and also extremely sweet. Almost too sugary.








Here's the missus. Well, she's behind that zucchini plant which is being removed. At one stage it took up over 2 square metres and boy was it pumping out the fruits. Costa Romanesco - ribbed for your pleasure, firm and delightful.









And here's yours truly not afraid to look a little silly cos gosh damn i sure was excited to harvest this little baby. First melon I ever grew. It's a Blacktail Mountail watermelon. Next year hopefully the housesitter won't move my trellises and so maybe the mildew won't get the melons so badly. Not bad for a first try, room to improve. Talks too much in class.



ps. yes i'm standing on a winner's podium.

4 comments:

Maria@TheGourmetChallenge said...

It looks like your had a very fruitful harvest. I love the stripped cucumber, dont think I've ever seen one of those before.

Ali H said...

Esther why didn't I come to see you garden when I was in Melbourne? What an oversight! I love perving & poking around in other people's veggie gardens! Would've loved to see your array of cucumbers & zucchinis & melons (oh cucurbitae, what a joy you are!). Also hints of nectarine trees sound so exciting, was it already there or did you plant it? I love reading about your harvest-preserving adventures, does it make you feel all frontier-like?

I have a mystery going on in my garden at the moment: there is something cucurbitae that emerged where I planted a bunch of cucumber seeds, so I guess I figured it was a cucumber? But I planted 'Lebanese' and 'Lemon' cucumbers, and neither of those are supposed to look like stripey little mini-watermelons, according to my research. So these vines are going crazy producing all these incredibly delicious mysterious cucumbery-but-sweet round stripey fruits, and I can't tell if it's a mutant watermelon sprung from the compost, or a mis-labelled batch of cucumber seeds. I mean I don't really mind cos they're delicious and they're one of the only things in my garden totally loving the Autumn weather, but it'd be nice to figure it out so I can plant them again.

joe cupcake said...

Ali, it's true - you should definitely have come for a visit. It was summer crazyness when you were down. Now it's cooled down a lot and it's weird having so much empty space again, looks a bit barren. But there are brassicas coming along and lots of tomatoes still cluttering up the kitchen.

The mini-watermelons sound very curious. How mini? Do they taste like melons? Oh how confusing. I grew some little green rockmelons that kinda match the description you gave. I wish my cucurbitae were loving autumn - they mostly seems quite withered and exhausted. It was not a good year for my clambering friends - trellises not built meant mildew got the melons. Though the lebanese cucumbers were booming which was very very excellent for my cucumber loving tummy.

ooh i hope you're going to visit some good gardens on your travels..

Dave Jones said...

Your garden looks great....i love that cucumber...i've never seen such big one.