In the CSA Share this Week:

• Broccoli
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Head Lettuce
• Sugar Snap Peas
• Zucchini
• Dill

On Rotation:

• Curly Kale (Wednesday members)
• Rainbow Chard (Saturday members)

Cool as a Cucumber! If you've ever grown your own cucumbers, you probably know how the plants go from zero to sixty practically overnight. This is that week on the farm, so wham!, you've got cucumbers in your tote all of a sudden, and plenty of 'em! I love cukes, always have, and I always wish the season was longer. We've been playing around with how to extend our production window over the past few years by trialing different varieties and planting staggered successions. This season we upped our game and took it to a whole new level by converting one of our high tunnels into a Persian cucumber laboratory. We enclosed the entire greenhouse with insect netting to keep the cucumber beetles out (cuke beetles are our primary cucumber pest, causing cosmetic damage and spreading bacterial wilt, which can kill the plant). Then we installed a vertical trellis system and planted three varieties of Persian cucumbers on two different planting dates. All of the varieties are parthenocarpic, meaning they don't need a pollinator to set fruit (this is critical for indoor production where we've excluded all insects, including our beneficial pollinators). Every week we twist the cucumber vine up the twine and prune off side-suckers to keep all the plant's energy going upwards.

We're a couple months into this experiment, the cukes have hit the roof (literally), and oh baby, what a dream! The fruit is delicious and nearly flawless. We've been getting small to medium harvests since early June - not enough to fill every CSA tote, but a good amount for our farmstand and some wholesale. Production exploded this past weekend with the extra heat at exactly the same moment that our bed of outdoor cukes kicked into gear, which means you've got cukes aplenty this week to make a lovely chilled cucumber salad (this recipe uses your dill and hopefully you have a purplette onion or two still kicking around). I also love riffing on the Asian cucumber salad at this time of year.

It's so fun picking the trellised Persians that we have to force ourselves to harvest the outdoor bed of slicing and pickling cukes first. Hmmm, what sounds more appealing: rolling a cart through a shady greenhouse, happily snipping countless, perfect, smooth-skinned cukes from tidy vines, or stooping over in the hot sun, scrabbling about in scratchy plants for crooked, misshapen Marketmores while dragging a heavy bin. Not to jump to any conclusions before our Persian lab experiment has run its full course, but I wouldn't be surprised if we make the switch entirely next year and say adios to outdoor field-grown cukes.

But in the name of good citizen science, you should help inform that decision: tell us what you think about the three slicing cukes versus the one Persian in your share this week. Is it no contest?

First planting of Persians, June 12th