In the Garden: Cucumbers and lo, the white cockroach!

In my quest to find something wonderful everyday in a 10 X 25 foot garden plot, you might say that finding cucumbers is not wonderful. I mean, it’s a garden, right? You should expect to find vegetables growing in a garden.

Well, I certainly did on my Pop’s farm in Connecticut, with its rich brown, well-manured soil and mild summers. Here in Deepswamp it’s more of a challenge. The bugs are immortal, temperatures can melt steel, and the soil mostly resembles flour. Still, people lived in Deepswamp and grew non-hybrid vegetables in the old days. What were their secrets?

So finding five beautiful cucumbers was rather wonderful. And the taste! Those waxy things that pass for cucumbers in the grocery store taste like water-soaked toilet paper by comparison. I wish I could give you some of these real cucumbers.

In the constant Battle of Bugs, score one for the squash vine borers. They killed my yellow squash plant and while removing the carcass yesterday, I thought I had found something super wonderful-lo, a white cockroach! As I raked around in the leaf mulch, thousands of cockroaches scurried about and one stood out because he was pure white.

Hmm, could he have some significance like the white buffalo calf that was born in New England a few years ago? I tried to pick him up, but-well, let me put it this way-white cockroaches are very fragile. As it turns out, he was not a sacred cockroach at all, just one that had recently shed his outer husk. He would turn brown in about eight hours.

I hope the image of thousands of cockroaches scurrying about doesn’t gross you out. Live here long enough and you get used to them, or as  Grandma used to say, “You get used to hanging if you hang long enough.”

Grandma said the craziest things. 🙂