KSGraham: Gardening

This fruit of the ancients has been cultivated for over 3,000 years. The cucumber is a hydrogen machine. Remember the simile "as cool as a cucumber?" It takes root from the fact that a cuke is 10 or more degrees cooler than the outside temperature. When placed on the skin, the cooling properties of a cucumber render a beautiful, healthy complexion. Just ask companies like Bath and Body Works whose staple is the Cucumber Melon product. In "Reclaim Your Life" by Carolyn Levett, she explains how to blend a cucumber to extract and create a heavenly facial juice. This tonic can clear your complexion and fend-off breakouts.

Are you truely a health conscious person? Then mix tenacious cucumber into a meal as it nutritionally can offer 12% of your daily source of fiber requirements. According to the world's healthiest foods.org, cucumbers contain cucurbitacins which scientists believe are capable of blocking cancer causing cells therefore reducing one's risk of developing future cancers.

When it comes to planting vegetables, old timers say to wait until after Good Friday to plant. I don't follow that tradition with most of my garden plants, like string beans and squash. Instead, I've seeded my garden a couple of weeks earlier for several years. In the past, too much of my time and money has been spent irrigating during patterns of drought, heat, and humidity. I've learned to get a good crop in before the mid-June heat scorches everything in the garden, Taking my chances, I followed the signs of the moon and had my seeds in the ground before the last light frost. The only plant that wasn't planted was the cucumber. Cucumbers need temperatures around 75-85 degrees to flourish, so it was best to wait until the end of April. Green squash plants were swelling before I dolloped the cucumber seeds in the mound.

Lady Luck laughed as she laced the ground with a late frost in May. I held my breath, not sure if anything in the garden would make it. Thank God it all lived. My cucumber seed buds weren't hampered. The plants peeked through dirt and made a grandstand in the mild, spring weather. I must say we have been surprised with lots of Pre-Summer rain spurred by an early arrival of tropical storms. With around 4 or more inches of rain in a day and a half, I was a little upset thinking everything would sog and rot. So far, the rains have actually given the plants just the amount of hydro they needed.

Thus we picked cucumbers from the vine in barefeet, rolled-up pants, and mud past our ankles (sorry, no pictures of that! Giggle! missed opportunity) and this week we are pickling cucumbers that are soaking in a crock.

Underneath is the recipe my grandmother passed down to me. I'm not sure where she may have gotten it. I know that this is what my family uses. It's quick and easy. She didn't go into much detail. I guess she figured she taught me enough about cooking that I could handle the fine details. I've tried 14 day pickles, recipes on the Clemson Extension website, and some in the above book Preserve It!

I keep coming back to Grandma Reba's.

thanks folks, ksg

I adore the eye candy we call a "Hat"...My grandmother gave me many that now adorn my wall. As a young girl, I would climb to the top of her mothball scented closet, and pull out the fine printed boxes tinted yellow with age. Climbing on my sister's shoulders, I dangled with one hand on the shelf and the other on one of those exquisitely huge boxes. Suddenly, all of the boxes and hats would topple out like bubblegum in a dimestore machine, and we'd scrounge to capture them all . My sister and I would covertly peek around the corner to make sure Grandma was engrossed in her chores. Unless "Days of our Lives" was airing, she was working. She would be cooking summer dinner (in the South that's lunch) for 15 or more who were coming in from the field. While her hands were in the biscuit dough, our hands were in her white elbow gloves. We would tiptoe with our arms piled with boxes into her pink-tiled bathroom. After primping for hours and using all her Hairnet, we lustily layered on the rouge. Do ladies still apply rouge? AnyHoo, finally we paraded in front of her sink-to-ceiling mirror in her mink hat or her pinky-orange straw hat. Those hats fit me perfectly back then, but as I grew so did my big noggin, and now I can't wear many of those daintly little hats that fit Grandma Reba Margaret. Thus they hang along with the ones I've collected in my bathroom reminding me of her each time I primp. Hats are still a passion. I wear them, buy them, paint, and photograph others in them.