Cucumber farm

Five minutes walk from my house, there is a small cucumber farm. Well, the real estate where I live is surrounded by vegetable farms and rice fields actually. :D Vegetable farmers usually grow cucumbers, long beans, bitter gourds, amaranth spinach, water spinach, chilies etc, not the plants that need cold weather like carrots, cabbages, etc here. Most of the farm land has been bought by the property developer though. So in a matter of years, the farms will be gone piece by piece turning into a new cluster of houses. But right now, I'm happy there are still vegetable farms near where I live. This way I can buy some fresh veggies cheaper than the ones sold in the market place.

The cucumber farm that I visited was almost in its expiration date. In the next few days, the plants will be killed with roundup herbicides. I just hope I can stock enough for a week or maybe two. :D Here's a pic of the farm:

Most of the harvested cucumbers were very young fruits. The one that I held on the pic below was considered too big for the marketplace where the farmer sold his harvest. He picked young ones like those are usually made into dill pickles in a jar. But I'm fine with this size, it's still young enough to eat it whole with its seeds. Younger ones are sweeter but the farmer said I could even take the big ones for free! YAY! Great snacks for me and my birds! Since all of us like to chew something now and then, cucumbers are great to satisfy our habits without making us fat! :D

Here are some cucumbers that I picked myself at the farm. I will go there and pick more daily until the farmer decided to cull the plants. :) Btw, it's only 1$ for 3 kg of cucumbers! Plus the big ones are free, and I've found a reason to leave my PC for a while and walk under the sun! :D

 

Could you tell me about cucumbers in your area? Like, what species that people grow there and how much are they in the marketplace?  Thanks! :D

Growing rosella in pots

Rosella (Roselle) is hibiscus related plant but its flower is not very big and will bloom for just a couple hours in the morning, so it's definitely not a very attractive plant to have for its beauty. Here's a pic of a rosella flower blooming. The color is pink but there are some that's more white/yellow.

 

One of the popular purposes of growing rosella is for harvesting its sepals. Once the flowers wilted, the seed capsule will grow big along with the sepals, like the pics below:

 

After 2 weeks, you can snip off the flower stem, harvesting the red sepals and you can use them for tea after you remove the seed capsules.

Put some rosella sepals in hot water, 6 sepals for a cup of tea, you can add rose petals too if you like. Let it set for 5 minutes or until the water color has changed into bright red. Don't boil the water with the sepals, it will ruin the vitamin C the tea is famous for. Pour into a cup, straining the sepals/petals out.

 

There you have a pretty red rosella tea ready to drink. The taste is a bit sour. It's like lemon infused water. The more sepals you use, the more sour the taste will be. :)

Try growing a few pots of rosella at once so you can have a cup of this red tea everyday. They are easy to grow and will grow very fast as long as they have enough sun shine. :)