The next meeting of the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be on Wednesday, October 18 at 7:00 PM at SIGN on North Street. Our special guest speaker will be Sonja Pawliw telling us about growing terrariums. Terrariums are a beautiful and interesting way to “garden on a tabletop” and Sonja will tell us what we need to get started and maintain a terrarium. Please join us. Everyone is welcome! You don’t have to be a member to come to the meeting.
A dear friend recently gave me a wonderful and interesting garden gift, and I’d like to tell you about it. Make a cup of tea and sit down with me so that I can tell you about a fascinating plant, new to me, the wild cucumber. Have you heard of it?
The wild cucumber belongs to the gourd family, but it’s the more dainty and delicate cousin. It has thin, stretching vines and delicate, pale green leaves, smaller in shape than a gourd, and similar to a maple leaf. The interesting thing about this little vine is the “cucumbers” that look like miniature kiwis with prickles. The plant is an annual that likes moist soil and will grow in part shade to sun. It will reappear in our gardens because it seeds itself when fall comes. The little cucumbers ripen as we get into September, pop open, the seeds fall out, and hopefully come up next year. The seeds look like cucumber or watermelon seeds.
If you are a gardener who likes to know the two-dollar, arm-length names of plants, the wild cucumber is called “Echinocystis lobata”. What does it mean? “Echinos” is Greek for hedge-hog; “cystis” means just what you’d think: a pouch or sac. “Lobata” is from Greek “lobos” for lobe, which describes the little cucumber itself, and if you see one that has dried and burst open, the name really fits because the inside is a hollow chamber.
Though it is called a cucumber, it is not for eating. This plant is purely for ornamental enjoyment in our gardens. Some information that I perused called this interesting little plant a “weed”, but as gardeners we know that the word “weed” is often in the eye of the beholder! As a wise man once said, “a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered”.
I have seen it growing along a fence at our friend’s home, and it looks beautiful; very delicate and a wonderful backdrop for other flowering plants that grow in front of it. However, in the right (or wrong!) situation I suppose it could be considered unwanted. But since it is an annual, it is likely easier to control than some invasive and aggressive perennials.
If you’d like to try this pretty little plant, ask some fellow gardeners who have the plants for some seeds and scatter them in your garden where you’d like them to grow. This is the time to acquire them for next year, because the seeds need a period of freezing then thawing in the spring to germinate. Hopefully next spring you’ll be enjoying your own wild cucumbers! They are lovely in the garden while they are growing, and later in the season, the dried pods can be used in dried arrangements, if you would like to prolong the beauty of your garden to enjoy indoors.
I’d like to remind you to visit our website, www.yorktonhort.ca to see what’s happening with the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society. You’ll find a list of upcoming events, as well as articles about various gardening topics. And if you’re looking for horticultural information on a provincial level, you can visit the Saskatchewan Horticultural Association’s (SHA) website at http://icangarden.ca for a list of their activities and other gardening information.
Good luck with your garden clean-up. Have a great week!
