Cucumbers store best at 45°F to 50°F, but most refrigerators are set to lower temperatures than this. Thus, we recommend you store them either in a warmer part of your fridge for just a few days, or just keep them on the counter at room temperature and use within a few days. Wash cucumbers just before use and note that our cucumbers are not dipped in wax or wrapped in plastic as many are in the retail grocery world. After several days they may become a little soft. Don’t throw them out as they are still good! It is natural for them to feel a little limp, just give them a quick ice bath before you are going to use them or use them in a recipe where they’ll be cooked.
Cucumbers are a member of the gourd family along with melons, squash and pumpkins. They are a fairly mild-flavored vegetable with a high water content which makes them the perfect summer vegetable to counter the heat! In this country we are most familiar with the American green slicer variety. However, in addition to green slicers we also grow a few other interesting varieties including silver slicers, our favorite cucumber. Silver slicer cucumbers are a little smaller than standard green slicers. They have a pale yellow skin and hold up well after picking without getting soft. They also tend to have a more tender skin that doesn’t get bitter and it has an excellent fruity flavor that is more pronounced than other varieties.
Cucumbers are most often used in salads, on sandwiches or they are pickled. However, they can also be cooked in stir-fries, turned into cold or hot soups, braised or lightly sautéed.
It’s up to you to decide if you want to peel them or not. If the skin is tender, I seldom peel cucumbers. The tenderness of the skin is dependent somewhat upon the variety, but also the maturity of the cucumber when it was picked as well as the point we’re at in the season. Thus, it’s your judgement call to decide if you want to peel them or not.
Cucumbers pair well with a wide variety of ingredients including herbs such as basil, cilantro, dill and parsley. They also go well with garlic, tomatoes, peppers, onions and cabbage. They are delicious when dressed with tangy vinaigrettes, but also marry well with creamy dressings and sauces made from yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese and buttermilk.
Growing Information: Cucumbers may be grown in a variety of growing systems. We choose to grow our cucumbers in the old fashioned way…in the dirt outside in the field! We do have a unique strategy, though. We start all of our cucumbers in the greenhouse as a transplant. They grow very quickly once the seed germinates, so we only have about three weeks from when the seeds are planted to get the field ready! We plant them on raised beds covered with a reflective silver plastic that has drip irrigation lines running underneath it. We do this for several reasons. First, the reflective plastic helps deter pests such as cucumber beetles which can wreak havoc on the plants by chewing the leaves and scarring the fruit. The plastic mulch also provides some heat gain which helps encourage growth in this heat-loving crop.
We plant an early crop that we put in the field as soon as possible in the spring and then do a second planting to get us through the latter part of summer. We typically cover the first planting with a row cover draped over wire hoops. This protects the plants from any chilly nights and also helps trap more heat to help the plants get established and take off. Once the plants are producing fruit, you can almost predict the volume of a harvest by the temperature. Ok, not quite, but they are very responsive to changes in temperature and if you have a really warm week you can really see some phenomenal growth and be surprised with harvests that literally double and sometimes triple seemingly overnight!
Additional Fun Facts: The inside of a cucumber can actually be up to 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature, hence the saying “cool as a cucumber.”
