The Cucumber Landrace Project – What Harvests! | The Survival Gardener

The landrace cucumber project is really in full swing this year.

We got home from little Julie’s funeral and picked the many cucumbers that had gotten big in the time we were gone.

All these cucumbers grew in the Grocery Row Gardens, where we planted them as a ground cover layer.

Some of the seeds are from the mix of pickling varieties we grew last year at the old house. That was the beginning of the landrace: just planting a half-dozen cucumber types and letting them all run together and interbreed.

This year we mixed in a few more types along with plenty of the seeds we saved from 2022.

The vines just run together and we let the insects cross all the types.

Each cucumber planting station in the Grocery Row Gardens contained 2-4 randomly selected seeds, so the types are all together and able to cross.

Thus far, the plants have been very vigorous and are producing much more than we can eat fresh.

And the cucumber yield as of this morning:

137lbs!

Our kitchen and porch are now overflowing with cucumbers. Today may have been our last picking, as we need to save lots of seeds for next year as well as to put up for sale.

Our goal for today is to make sweet relish, lots of jarred dills and some live fermented pickles. The 60lbs or so in the kitchen need processing ASAP.

Because when you have a ton of produce all at once, you just have to declare

…and get it done.

We’re greatly enjoying the landrace gardening idea, as it makes seed saving much more fun. We’re also seeing higher vigor this year, which we’d like to attribute to the adaptation of genetics; however, we also moved from The Cursed Sandpit of Death to our current home which has nice sandy loam soil, so we can’t really make any judgements.

EVERYTHING is growing better here, landrace or not. We’ve already hauled in over 200lbs of potatoes and 54lbs of radishes, which were two of our larger spring crops.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the year goes. There are so many exciting projects in the works!

…but we’ll have to talk again later.

It’s time to make pickles.

For more info on landraces, you need to get Landrace Gardening by Joseph Lofthouse.

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