Cucumber Giveaway
My husband doesn’t know when to quit. He lives by the motto “More is better,” which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
Take his garden. We are both retired and our children moved out years ago, but Tom’s newfound passion calls him to put in 10,000 square feet of meticulously maintained vegetable garden.
August is harvest season in Minnesota, and Tom inspects his plants daily, bringing piles of green beans and an occasional mammoth head of cabbage for me to prep for dinner or cram into the freezer. He is smart enough not to put in any any overzealous zucchini plants, but we do have cucumbers. A lot of them. I’m happy to prep them with yogurt or vinegar for dinner, but I’m not really interested in getting into that whole pickling thing. Which leaves Tom with a lot of cucumbers.
Last year we decided to offer them for free on a table on the fairly busy bike/walking path that runs past our four acres. Forty years ago a gravel road separated us from the soybean field across the way, and the farmer who owned the field spent as much time tinkering underneath his tractor his beat up old tractor as he did driving. While we still live in a slightly-crumbling, aged farmhouse, and soybeans still grow in the field across from us, the development crowding ever closer around us caters to a fairly young, affluent crowd.
So I wasn’t sure if people would be interested in a few free cucumbers. Turns out they were. We know because we could watch them as we ate dinner or drank coffee on our front porch.
One well-dressed woman in an expensive car pulled over to carefully inspect the free cucumbers, choosing one that suited her fancy. Another woman parked, seeming a bit uncertain as she pondered her options. She finally took a couple of cucumbers and tucked a five dollar bill under a remaining cuke as she left.
A dad towing a preschooler in a bike bugger stopped and they both approached the table. The little boy got to choose which cucumbers to bring home, while the dad pulled out his phone and photographed the transaction. A few days later they returned. The dad explained they lived a few miles away, but his son had insisted they come back to see if there were any more cucumbers to be had.
One older vehicle pulled up and six young men who had clearly spent the day working outside stepped out. I could tell they were conversing in Spanish, and weren’t entirely sure whether the cucumbers were, in fact, free. I knew the language so went out and reassured them the cucumbers were indeed a gift. One asked if it would be okay if they took all the cucumbers, and I assured him they could. The six men eagerly gathered up maybe fifteen cucumbers, happily piled into their vehicle and drove off. The only mishap we had during that summer was when we saw someone packing up the table, thinking it, too, was part of the offer. We managed to stop them in time.
Today my husband took a look at his cucumber vines and decided it was time to put the free cucumber stand back in business. He’d been out of town so there were a couple of five-gallon pails of unpicked cucumbers. He set up shop and laid out the cucumbers; they were all gone within three hours. The last young couple who stopped, bikes strapped to the back of their SUV, hollered “thank you,” smiled and waved as they took off.
I don’t think anyone is stopping because they can’t afford to buy a cucumber. I do think the prospect of a stranger sharing bounty unexpectedly, bounty that comes from nature and is so simple, is what charms our “customers.” The sight of them stopping certainly charms us.