Vegetable Gardening (49 page)

You can pick snow peas anytime before the pea seeds inside the pods begin to form.
After the peas begin to fill out, the pods get tough and stringy.

You can harvest the tender shoots and tendrils of peas.
Harvest from the end of the shoots back 2- to 3-inches including the leaves and tendrils. The shoots and tendrils are great sautéed or mixed raw in salads. It's a way to get the pea flavor without the peas and to use more parts of the pea plant.

Chapter 8: Vigorous Vines: Cucumbers, Melons, Pumpkins, and Squash

In This Chapter

Choosing the best vining varieties for your garden

Understanding how to grow and maintain your viners

If the heat is on, it's time to grow your vining veggies. This group of vegetables is part of the cucumber family (
Cucurbitaceae
), and it includes cucumbers, melons, squash, and pumpkins. Gourds also are in this family, but I discuss them in Chapter 11.

What all these vegetables have in common is their love of heat, their ability to grow long stems (and vine to great lengths), and the fact that they have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Unlike the other vegetables that I mention in this book (which have both male and female parts in the same flower), the viners need someone to play Cupid and bring pollen from the male flower to the female flower in order to produce fruit. This process is called
pollination,
and usually bees play the role of the chubby cherub. Of course, there are exceptions to the Cupid rule, and I discuss them in the sections about the individual vegetables in this chapter.

This large family of vegetables is known for producing lots of fruits and taking up lots of room in the process. However, modern plant breeders have responded to the need for smaller, space-saving vegetable plants by breeding
bush
(nonvining) varieties of some favorite cucumber-family crops. So now you have one more reason to grow some cucumbers and squash. Actually, if you've ever tasted a vine-ripened melon or cucumber or baked a homegrown winter squash, you're probably hooked. Their flavor and texture are much better than anything you can buy in stores, and if you grow too many vegetables, you can always give them away to hungry neighbors.

Checking Out Cool Cukes

Cucumber varieties usually are categorized two ways: as slicers and picklers. Slicing-cucumber varieties are long, smooth-skinned cucumbers that tend to be larger, a darker shade of green, and have thicker skin with fewer bumps (spines) than pickling varieties, which are short and prickly. Slicing cucumbers are the ones you're probably most familiar with from grocery stores; they're great in salads and other recipes, but they're also super for munching. Of course, you can use pickling varieties the same ways you use slicing varieties, and they're great when eaten fresh, but if you want to make pickles, the pickling varieties have better textures for it.

The easiest cucumber varieties to grow are the hybrid bush types. These varieties, such as ‘Salad Bush', are good producers, are disease resistant, and produce a small vining plant that can grow in a container. Bush types don't produce as many cucumbers as larger vining varieties, nor do they produce them all summer long. But if you have a small family, a few bush varieties should be plenty.

To round out the cucumber field in this section, I describe some unusual
heirloom
(old-fashioned) varieties and some modern, seedless cucumber varieties that produce fruit without pollination. If you plant one of the seedless varieties (these varieties actually have seeds, but the seeds aren't developed), avoid planting any other cucumber varieties in your garden. If a seedless variety gets pollinated by bees, edible but seedy fruits will result. For that reason, gardeners often grow these varieties in greenhouses, which protect the plants from bees. (See the section "Ensuring proper pollination," later in this chapter, for more information.)

Before you choose: Brushing up on some cucumber vocabulary

When you're reading about cucumber varieties, you may notice some words — such as
gherkin
and
gynoecious
(guy-NEE-shous) — that would challenge even the best Scrabble player. Fortunately, you don't need to memorize these terms to grow good cucumbers. However, they do enable you to figure out the type of cucumber that you're buying — and impress your friends! Here are some terms to be familiar with:

Burpless:
This thin-skinned cucumber type has a long, slender shape and a mild flavor that isn't bitter. It's said to produce less intestinal gas than other varieties, which clearly explains where it got its name.

Gherkin:
Actually, this type is a whole different species of cucumber (
Cucumis anguria
). It's used commercially as a pickling cucumber. Gherkins have small, oval shapes and prickly skin. As far as the home gardener is concerned, this species difference has no effect.

Gynoecious:
This type of cucumber has only female flowers and requires the presence of a male pollinating cucumber variety to produce fruit. Usually, seed companies include seeds of a pollinating variety in packets of gynoecious cucumbers; the seeds are marked with a bright-colored coating.

Monoecious:
This cucumber type has both male and female flowers on the same plant. Most cucumber varieties are of this type.

Oriental cucumbers:
This type of cucumber tends to be a thin, long-fruited variety with ribbing on its skin.