Cucumbers in the Garden: A Refreshing Treat

There is nothing better during the summer months than being able to harvest some fresh fruits and vegetables from your own garden to eat for a meal. The taste and smell alone of these fresh products enhance the senses unlike any produce you can buy in the store. This is homegrown goodness at its best without the use of chemicals, preservatives, food dyes, waxes, and other annoying elements.

Cucumbers growing in a garden

A Brief History of Cucumbers

Cucumbers have been cultivated for over 3,000 years, originating in India and the Middle East. They prefer to grow in regions with a temperate to tropical climate, with temperatures of 60 to 90 degrees in a sunny location. Although they prefer a rich, well-drained soil, they can also grow in conditions where the soil is poor with good results. Just allow them plenty of moisture when they are producing to encourage healthy fruiting.

Growing Cucumbers

People usually plant cucumbers in hills with three to five seeds per hill. As the plants emerge, they grow outward from the center to fill in the space between the hills. Make sure each hill is approximately 5 to 6 feet apart to allow for the vines to grow without crowding. Each vine can grow up to 8 feet long and have large dark green leaves with fine hairs on them.

Cucumbers vines growing outwards

The Fruit

The vine will produce male flowers first, followed by female flowers that produce the cucumbers after pollination. Cucumbers can grow as large as 24 inches long by 3 1/8 inches thick depending on the variety, but the best flavors come from the ones that are 8 to 10 inches long by about 1 1/2 inches in thickness. Larger fruits tend to have many more seeds, which many people do not enjoy.

Nutritional Value

Cucumbers are packed full of healthy nutrients. They contain three strong elements known as phytonutrients: flavonoids, lignans, and triterpenes. These are found mostly in the seeds and skins of the cucumber, which should never be eliminated from a meal. If you are buying non-organic, store-bought produce, it is suggested to scrub the skins of the fruit before consuming, but eating organic is the healthiest way to go if you want to avoid chemicals and pesticides.

Using Cucumbers in Your Diet

Whether you are looking for their nutritional value or you are simply looking for a refreshing treat from the garden, cucumbers will fill your craving. You can slice them and eat them cold with nothing on them, or you can add them to your favorite salad to add an extra crunch to the mix. Pickling them allows you to enjoy them for months in the future with the same crispness and texture as that would have from the garden, with a few added flavors of garlic, dill, and other herbs.

Pickling cucumbers

A Marriage That Changed Literary History

Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne was 36, 11 years older than Robert Louis Stevenson, an American, a wife, and a mother. Originally from Indiana, she had married at 17, quickly had a baby, and followed Sam Osbourne, her good-looking and good-natured but feckless husband, to mining camps in the West, where he tried unsuccessfully to strike it rich. Her father gave her a pocket pistol when she left home. She kept it in her bag and learned to shoot a rifle as well.

Fanny and Louis fell in love almost at first glance, though between the two of them, it is hard to say who was the less impressive catch, the abandoned and abandoning wife or the sickly post-adolescent. Each responded to the other’s core vitality.

Fanny and Louis

A Life of Adventure

Their life together led them back to Europe, to Switzerland, Scotland, the south of France, and England, before, famously, Samoa in the final years, always in search of relief from Louis’s physical ordeals, almost always short of money—with writing always in mind.

I am fully convinced by A Wilder Shore that without Fanny, the great body of work created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his truncated life of 44 years would not exist. He seems to have been born a stylist, a writer whose sentences delight with their originality, grace, freedom, and bull’s-eye accuracy. However, the knowledge of human character that underlies his wild adventure tales, the kind of knowledge that Dickens acquired from childhood misery and his work as a reporter, Louis got from life with Fanny.

Robert Louis Stevenson