harvest time!

I decided that my cucumbers were ready to eat today. 

They were quite tasty, though not crazy delicious. I sort of expected them to be sweeter than normal, since I had just picked them. 

Here's a biology lesson for you: You probably know that plants perform photosynthesis to make their energy. sunlight + CO2 + water = sugar. Plants have an enzyme that chains sugars together to make starches, which are easier to store for future use. When you harvest a fruit (ie. remove it from its plant), it stops photosynthesizing, therefore stops making sugar, but the enzyme keeps working to turn sugars into starches. So if you eat a fruit that was picked a week ago, it will be more starchy and less sweet than a fruit you picked a minute ago (assuming they are both ripe). That's why fresh picked corn is so damned awesome. 

There is another lesson about how commercial farmers pick fruit long before it is ripe, transport it with a fungicide to prevent loss to fungus during travel, then spray the fruit with ethylene gas to ripen it. Which is why farmers market produce is tastier and better in so many ways than grocery store produce. 

And what you can take from all of this is that fruits naturally produce ethylene gas, which in turns stimulates them to ripen (positive feedback cycle), so if you keep fruits in a bag, they will ripen quickly. This is why you should hang your bananas and keep fruits in a basket instead of a bowl (unless you want them to ripen quickly).

I should turn this into a "lessons in biology" blog. It seems that I need an outlet for this trivia.

Anyway, I expected a little more greatness from my cukes, but they were certainly tasty, and it was much more rewarding to eat them than a store-bought cuke. I have more growing, so now I'll have to cheer them on. And my beans too, who are doing great.