As my tomatoes died, the gherkins continued to thrive
Sept. 23 haul
The unexpected star of my garden two years ago was, no question about it, spinach. Last year: never-ending basil. This year’s surprise star performer: sour Mexican gherkins.
I planted just one seedling at the start of the summer. It was a leftover from the delivery of seedlings we get at our community garden several times a summer from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society as part of the City Harvest program.
nickle-sized “mouse melons”
co-existing with tomatoes
I had never heard of sour Mexican gherkins before but they’ve begun showing up in cutting-edge farmers markets in the last few years, selling for $24 a pound, according to a report by Christopher Weber in Modern Farmer. They’ve got many names, including cucamelon, mouse melon, and sandita (little watermelon) in Spanish. One thing they’re often called that they’re not is cucumbers. Though they’re from an entirely different genus, they have a cucumber taste with a slightly lemony tang.
The one seedling I had to work with was a wispy little thing that wouldn’t last in my crowded garden, I thought, as I wedged it into a tiny opening next to the leg of a trellis for my cherry tomatoes. I figured it would be overwhelmed by the cherry tomatoes in short order. But it grew, sending fragile vines shooting up through the top of the tomatoes. Over the weeks and months of the summer, that one plant sent a web of fast-growing vines for 10 feet in each direction down my garden row, covering everything.
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climbing up the okra
The vines formed such a lacy net of fine stems and dainty leaves that they didn’t kill off the plants they engulfed. To the contrary, my sour Mexican gherkin seemed to coexist with everything, from tomatoes and okra, to the ferns in my asparagus patch, and even my potted fig tree.
intermingled with asparagus ferns
That 20-foot web of vines from one plant is covered with tiny gherkins by the dozens, amounting to hundreds over the course of the harvest season, that started in July and is going strong with a week to go in September.
What to do with them all? I tried refrigerator pickles. Didn’t work. They are crunchy and a bit too tough to eat of hand in any quantity. I found they were best when chopped and marinated for a day or two, as in this chopped salad with onions, tomatoes, parsley, basil, vinegar and oil. For a relish-style variation, I pulsed some of the chopped salad a few times in a food processor.
Ingredients for a chopped sour Mexican gherkin salad
the salad
relish-style after a few pulses in the food processor
yielded a continuous harvest of spinach clippings since March. 