what a cucumber is worth

I worked my first Saturday yesterday, Saturdays will always be half days, making the idea of working on the weekend significantly more bearable. We spend the whole morning on one project: cukes and zukes.

And as it turns out, a lot of work goes into growing any organic food, but your cucumbers and squash are especially spoiled. The tractor pulls an implement which lays down a bed of black plastic. So, picture a whole 180 foot bed with a path of any black plastic bag. Then we poke a hole in the plastic every 18 inches, and plant the cuke or zuke inside the whole. After being transplanted, all the beds have wire hoops placed over the beds every 5 feet or so and then we cover the beds with floating row cover (remay, as its called).

The black plastic is to keep the soil warm and the weeds out. Since plants in the cucurbit family don't grow straight up, but wander and spread out on the ground, they are much harder to weed by hand or with tractor implements. The remay and hoops are there to protect the young plant from the cucumber beetle (beasts that would be fought with pesticides on a conventional farm). The cucumber beetles eat the plants (no good) and sometimes infect the plants with a funky bacteria (also no good). So the remay stays on until the plants flowers, and then the remay comes off so the plant can be pollinated by insects (yay bees!)