Nutgraf

Horticulture is fun.

May God have mercy on us all. I'm planting again.

Clearly, I didn’t learn my lesson last year, when my yard was visited by the enormous orange cucumber of vengeance. I’m still not sure whether it was a blessing, an omen or a dire, dire warning that I am failing to heed.

Spouse claims these things happen all the time in Russia, and that the babushkas use the seeds of enormous orange cucumbers to sow the next year’s crop. So, last year, I scraped, washed and saved the seeds from my own enormous orange cucumber. I won’t lie – it was weirdly horrifying.

Last week, I stuck a couple into each of these four paper cups to see what might happen and was rewarded by this one, robust sprout that I’m feeling strangely maternal about.

It’s also kind of like Science Fair when I was 8. Now, for no good reason, I want to get a good idea of what percentage of these seeds might be viable, and Spouse told me another story about babushkas: that they take a few seeds, place them between two damp paper towels, and in a day or two the live ones will wake up.

You know what’s coming next, right?

Starting my own mutant cucumber army.

Heaven help us if even a quarter of these things hatch. Last year’s plants tried to take over the yard, and there were only two of them. Now, there are 40 germinating away in my kitchen.

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