Sunday Slice! 11/02/2018 - Growing food at home!

Growing at home in the suburbs with no soil

So some time ago my father and I have started to grow bits of food at home. Not enough to make us self-sufficient. Not by a long shot, but every bit helps.

The economy in South Africa sometimes has certain bits of produce sky-rocketing in price suddenly. Even though I can't always grow THAT resource which has spiked, I CAN make the whole budget more affordable by producing some of my own food.

I have a tiny paved back yard. This was not going to stop me from doing something. After all - 'n boer maak 'n plan.

So what we did to be able to grow in my little yard I shall explain in another post. There are pots and there are some other panels we built that we used to grow various "crops" in.

Today I would like to show off one particular plant that surprised me and is doing very well. Cucumbers!

It all starts out with a little flower

What you can see in this picture in the foreground is a female flower of the cucumber plant. Once pollinated the part behind the flower and all the way to the stem becomes the cucumber. This one in the photo is already "pregnant".

In the background of this photo you can see another flower, this is the male flower. It has a short little stem that does not grow forward and is often a bit more open wide.

And then it grows!

Here we can see the flower still attached but shriveling. The cucumber kind of blows up like a balloon, inflating from the back and pushing forward in super slow motion!

Here we have a cucumber that is nearly ready for the picking. It is pretty much symmetrical and very heavy. This is a local species of cucumber that is able to grow in the South African climate better than imported types. We can have a look at the differences in the kitchen.

In the Kitchen

So quite incidentally my father used to work in the tunnel plantations where the usual store-bought cucumber is grown. Because of this I have some first hand knowledge on what happens in these tunnels. One thing is for sure, the long English Cucumber as my father calls it, grows at a phenomenal rate in the tunnels. We are talking about centimeters per day! As such these cucumbers are a lot of water and the cells are not yet jacked with other nutrients. Before they can mature, the production of the tunnel growers dictate that they need to cut, pack and ship them out.

Instead this short little guy was left to grow naturally and is packed with vitamins and minerals. We pick it off once we see the skin is maturing. This is because we look at our plants every day.

So one of these cucumbers, sliced thinly was added to the salad of this meal. We are a family of four (myself, my father, Aime and Meren). One cucumber was enough for this meal and look... cucumber everywhere!

The plant itself

What is great about this experience of growing these cucumbers is that I didn't have to read up about them. I already mentioned that this was a hardy local breed and that was a blessing because the plants were very forgiving to our learning curve. (Unlike the tomatoes we did a while back.)

We knew for sure that this cucumber was going to creep and because of that, it is important to provide it with something to hold on to. We gave the cucumbers a solid wooden bar and then strings that were spun from the top of the wall to the wood and down. The cucumbers "roam" around with their tendrils and within hours of putting these lines up, they attached and wrapped themselves in.

I have since learned of a neat trick from reading a post by @soulturtle that planting a crop that is rigid on their own with a creeper makes a great plant pairing. In his case there was the Three Sisters of Corn, Beans and Melons/Pumpkins. The last in the trio was to create a ground cover to keep other plants away, but i don't exactly have space for that in my set up, nor do I have need to keep other plants out.

@soulturtle's whole post here.

I will look into doing something similar in my scale... corn is not exactly a pot plant. However, there are other considerations...

The cucumber plant does not like direct sunlight. In the photo you can see the drooping of the leaves. The plant is not dying though. What it does is to pull the moisture from the leaves which causes the droop. This prevents water loss due to evaporation. If it gets shade however... look at the other plant.

A quick test was for us to place a wooden board over the plant to create shade. Within minutes the cucumber plant re-inflated the leaves and looked healthy as can be.

So without going building anything specific we used some old sheets to give the plants some cover and this has worked rather well. Especially against the direct sunlight of noon. Now the plants get a bit of direct light in the morning. From 10:30AM till afternoon they have shade though.

Plans for the future

The reason we have not made a permanent fixture for shade etc, is because we are currently planning some new techniques and places to plant. So once my dad and I have gotten a decent plan we can start building some permanent fixtures.

Until next time,
Regards.
Zak Ludick