YES! We Have Cucumbers!

Over the week-end, we found three cucumbers and they were READY!!

Oh, they were delicious!

The first picture is a yellow blossom. The cucumber is growing right at the base of the flower.

The second picture is one beautiful cucumber almost ready to be plucked!

The third picture is the entire cucumber section of the tarp garden.

The cucumbers were carefully trained to grow up and over a rack. The rack had a former use and was to be thrown away. It was re-purposed and is now the cucumber rack. Things don't have to be brand new in the tarp garden.

You don't need many plants either. I think we have four cucumber plants. That is plenty for us. We are a family of three and our garden supplies us and our neighbors. I take a basket or two of assorted goodies to work as well during the season.

People enjoy home grown produce. When you get a bite of one of these cucumbers, you'll quickly learn why!

Rows for the Tarp Garden Should Be STRAIGHT

Our late friend Grampa always sparred with us when it came to our gardens. He would plant his garden and tell us how to make sure the rows were straight. We would plant our garden and tell him how fast the tomato plants were growing. Whenever it got down to putting up or shutting up the arguments would die down and we'd focus on something else, like solving the world's problems. We've been missing him. He was 87 and he lived a good life too.

I guess straight rows are important and maybe for no other reason than for the sake of organization. In the tarp garden, before putting down the tarp, one should trapse through the garden to make two ditches with a hill of sorts in the middle. We have called it, "stomping the rows". It's just our way of making the rows. The area that is stomped becomes the ditch that allows the gathering of any excess water. As soon as the rows are stomped the entire garden is covered up with the tarp. The straight rows are revealed as we lay down the bricks in the ditches.

The Beginning of the Tarp Garden

The Tarp Garden was started when I was pregnant with our sweet baby boy. Christopher will be twenty at the end of this month. The Tarp Garden was started out of necessity. We had always had a garden, but the summer I gave birth, I was unable to get out and weed the garden. I don't think I had ever read The Good Earth, but that's another story.

This man came along one day and offered to weed our garden. My husband quickly jumped on the notion and we paid the stranger twenty dollars for cleaning it up. He only asked for fifteen. There were so many weeds! Wow!

That weed-ridden garden has never happened again.

We till the garden with a front-tine rototiller. We cover the entire garden with black visqueen. Visqueen is an odd word. It is a thin sheet of plastic film and black in color. It is thick enough that it won't tear unintentionally and thin enough to maneuver around in the garden.

We happen to have a number of red bricks because my husband is in the construction business. He can't bear to dispose of old brick when a house is torn down, so they come home to our house.
They're handy as we use them to hold down the visqueen.

Marking the rows is next,,,,but we are tired right now and need to rest. Stay tuned.