Like my wonderful fig-sharing neighbour, I too have been sharing the food garden bounty! As the tomato plants have started to die back and I pulled out the dead corn stalks (it was just too hot this summer to grow the beans up the dead corn stalks) some of the other vegetables are just coming into their own. Like these Lebanese cucumbers that are so vigorous, they're climbing our bottlebrush tree:
Now we have cucumbers hanging out of the tree!
Cucumbers are a bit like zucchini in the way they like to hide and secretly grow into giant monster vegetables. I can monitor their growth from my kitchen window and when I see one is the perfect size for picking, I go and hunt for it. Do you think I can find them, though?? How do they do that?!
Consequently, we're eating a LOT of cucumber, which is great because it's such a tasty vegetable. We eat it in chicken and salad wraps, I make it into salsa, I make a chunky tzatziki by mixing cucumber cubes with Greek yoghurt, fresh mint and crushed garlic, it makes a wonderful side dish for bbq lamb cutlets, another recipe with yoghurt, I mixed diced cucumber with halved cherry tomatoes in yoghurt with some chermoula spice mix. Yum! Of course there's always cucumber in vege stir fry, salad and of course, the jug of Pimms. But a family of two (the beagles don't like cucumber as much as they like other vegetables) can only consume so much cucumber. So I have been leaving a few specimens with my (non-food growing) neighbours with the last of the cherry tomatoes and an invitation to help themselves to basil or herbs from the herb patch to make up a salad.
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