Last summer we planted cucumbers. Lots and lots of cucumbers. Way too many cucumbers. Aaron loves pickles; he loves them passionately. My friend Melinda loves pickles passionately too, so I knew I would be able to make lots of pickles and have homes for them. So we planted 20 hills of cucumbers.
That's right, 20 hills. (Go ahead, snicker, I know you want to.)
20 hills of cucumbers makes a lot of cucumbers. A lot of cucumbers.
I made pickles. Dill pickles, Garlic Dills, Dills with Peppers and Onions, Sweet, Refrigerator-Style. I pickled and pickled until I couldn't pickle any more. (70 jars, 5 kinds!) But the plants kept making cucumbers. I tried to sell cucumbers, but I felt so guilty about charging for these unwanted veggies that I started giving them away. By the box. Pretty soon all my friends said, "We've had enough!"
And those dang vines kept making cucumbers. We were desperate to get rid of cucumbers, so we started feeding them to our chickens. It turns out that our chickens LOVE cucumbers. We would slice them lengthwise and set them on the floor of the chicken coop, and our chickens would get so excited they would run across the coop, fluff up their feathers and go to town on the cucumbers. I felt much better, knowing that they wouldn't be going to waste. They made the chickens happy, and happy chickens make really exceptional eggs.
But as the garden wound down last fall, I told Aaron that one thing was for sure: in future we would only plant 4 hills of cucumbers. I just could not deal with that many cucumbers again, happy chickens or no.
Fast forward to this spring.
We rotate our garden crops and spend a lot of time meticulously planning what goes where, how much goes in, when it goes in, whether we can get two plantings in per summer, etc. We tilled up our plots, which had been resting quietly under a bed of organic compost (thank you, chickens!) and began planting carefully according to the master plan.
Fast forward 2 weeks.
I went out back one afternoon to do a little garden maintenance last week. The potatoes and peas are already 8 inches off the ground; the carrots, onion, turnips, and beets are up. The tomatoes, green peppers and beans are going strong. Only one thing seemed strange...there was quite a lot of green in between our carefully planted rows.
I'm used to tilling up weeds; we have to till or hand remove weeds all summer because we don't use any herbicide to kill unwanted growth. But there just seemed to be an awful LOT of the same little green 2-leafed weed all over the place.
And that 2-leafed weed looked awfully familiar.
It took me a full 5 minutes to realize what it was. Cucumbers. And I'm not talking a few random volunteer cucumbers. HUNDREDS of cucumbers, and they were EVERYWHERE. It looked like a helicopter had dropped a bucket of cucumber seeds in my garden. They were in between the rows, in between the new plants, choking out my carrots, strangling my onions, and intertwining with my peas. They were in the middle, on the edges...they were everywhere. Every. Where.
I was so flabbergasted, I was at a loss for words for a few minutes. How can this be possible? We hadn't planned to put cucumbers in these beds; the four planned hills are in a different plot in the back. At first I thought maybe Aaron snuck a bunch of cucumbers into the plot hoping for another pickling extravaganza. One summer we had volunteer tomatoes, and I couldn't bring myself to pull out a perfectly healthy plant so we just let them grow. I had way too many tomatoes too, but I vowed that I would remedy that problem this year too. Perhaps he was hoping to sneak the cucumbers by me? Then again, Aaron is quite particular as to how things are planted (our rows are perfectly parallel, exactly 36 inches apart) and he would never have planted these in such a random, haphazard pattern.
I was just about to holler for Aaron and demand an explanation when it hit me.
We compost. From our chickens. And guess what our chickens ate quite a lot of last fall...?
The irony is almost too much for me.
