After discovering that one of the plants on the container was a cucumber, I put out a small trellis for it to climb today. (See Container Vegetable Garden Update 001) We have pieces of this trellis all over the garden from the previous owners (16 years ago!?!?) so we always have a bit to use wherever we need it. There are tons of flowers on the cucumber so given a little bit of space it might produce quite a few.
You might ask, “How come you don’t know what is growing in your containers?” Well, when we used our own compost to make the potting soil it contained seeds that had made it through the compost process. Most home compost piles don’t get hot enough to kill or break down the seeds of you might put it in, so when you water the compost/potting soil new plants can simply appear. In this case, somewhere in the past, we put a cucumber on the compost pile and this plant is the result of its seeds. We have also have some volunteer tomatoes, tree saplings and more from our last batch of seedlings.
I don’t really mind these volunteers. It can be interesting to figure out what plants they are and whether or not you want to keep them. This hones your plant identification skills and often gives you some extra plants and food. So far we have a tomato that we overwintered, pumpkins from an old jack-o-lantern, zucchini and now this cucumber all started using this “method”, if you can really call it a method. Still, why not take advantage of what is offered. (LAUGH)
