The Cucumber Invasion

Once upon a time, school started on Monday and I went back to work and remembered that I don’t have time to do anything anymore ever again. Since I’m still grieving the loss of my free time, I’ll write about something I did this summer, to process my turbulent emotions.

So, Judah and I planted a garden in a small plot on the side of our house. I’ve never had much luck with gardening in the past, so I had my doubts. However, our garden really took off this year. In fact, it was completely out of control.

Yes, our garden is taking over.

But we got a lot of good produce out of it.

Here’s one of our many green bean harvests. We also had spinach and lettuce earlier in the season.

And then we had cucumbers.

We picked thirty five cucumbers.

THIRTY. FIVE.

What does one even do with thirty five cucumbers?

I’ll tell you.

We gave quite a few away, but we also found some pretty interesting recipes. I really don’t like mayonnaise, so I was really excited to find some mayonnaise-free recipes for cucumber salad, like this cucumber dill greek yogurt salad. Or how about this Japanese cucumber salad? I ate this stuff all the time. SO GOOD. Eat it on rice with an egg for breakfast, eat it on ramen for lunch, have it as a side for dinner.

You can also make pickles. We made bread and butter pickles, which is Judah's favorite kind.

This is a bit of a problem for me because I hate pickles.

But I LOVE cantaloupe!

Also, something I learned from this venture is that I could never be a food blogger. I have no patience for staging my food and taking artful pictures. I just want to get it in my mouth. Most of these photos are just snapshots from my phone. The only things I actually got my camera out for were the pickles, probably because I was in no rush to eat those.

So anyway, sorry for the lousy pictures, but I hope you can use some of these recipes! And let me know if you want any pickles…