For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
how to fix bitter cucumbers
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Picture this: You pick your first ripe cucumber off the vine, eagerly bite into it as you're standing in the garden, and then... blecchhh. It's so bitter that it almost tastes like soap. Same with the next cucumber. What happened?! Bitter cucumbers are not uncommon, especially if you've had a very hot summer. Sometimes it's just the skin that's bitter, but bitter-tasting flesh and seeds can make the whole fruit nearly inedible. The good news is you still have at least another month or two in your harvest window, and if the first few cucumbers were unpalatable, there's a lot you can do to make sure the next harvest is bitter-free. (My quick kitchen salvage trick works for store-bought cucumbers too.) Seasonal tips✨ Deal alert ✨When we're nearing the end of the season, I've always got my eye out for great seed deals. (Scoring seeds for free or cheap just happens to be one of my talents. 😆) And here's one that just appeared on my radar: a fall clearance assortment sale where you can get 30 seed packets for $25!​ Sometimes these kinds of deals include seed varieties you'll probably never grow, or they're a grab bag of mystery seeds that may or may not work in your climate. Not so with this deal: It comes from True Leaf Market (who I buy from almost every year) and they list all the varieties that come in this assortment. I took a look at the list and out of those 30 seed packets, I'll likely use 22 of them. (The others don't work in my short-season climate.) 22 out of 30 isn't bad, and I'm still getting an insane deal at $1.13 per packet for high-germination seeds (many of which I currently grow or have grown in the past).
I'm also adding their Austrian field peas to my order, which I grow as a winter cover crop every year. (You can read more about my simple planting process here.) P.S. If your cucumbers taste more bitter than sweet, here's what you can do to fix that. |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."