Mystery Cucumber

I got my first cucumber!

Unfortunately, it was one of the standard old green kinds; my weirdo, heirloom lemon-shaped-and-colored cucumbers are still all in the flower stage. I titled this post "mystery cucumber" because the circumstances of this cucumber were a little mystifying to me. I was just tromping around my garden, trying to suppress the weeds growing up through my mulch by frowning at them, when I noticed a fully ripe, 8 inch long cucumber on one of my plants. That on its own wouldn't be weird, but then I looked around to see if there were any others, and there was nothing. A few flowers on this bush, no baby cucumbers yet...

Perhaps this particular bush was channeling all of its energy into this one cucumber. Maybe this is normal, I don't know. But I am now keeping a closer eye on all of my cucumber and squash plants, because who knows what other fruits have has escaped my notice during their entire childhood.

The other plants I think I am keeping better tabs on, though. My runner beans look quite nice climbing up their makeshift trellis-y thing and my tomato plants are staked, relatively happy looking, and flowering copiously. I also have a teeny tiny eggplant. I am worried, since it looks pretty ripe, that it is going to stay teeny tiny -- a product of a stunted plant, rather than just a fruit in its early stages. I started this plant indoors, and perhaps I did a poor job meeting its needs as I transplanted it. I hesitate to say that it's just an issue of soil fertility (although I readily admit that my soil is a serious work in progress) because the other plants in that area are doing much better. My pepper transplant is having the same tiny-ness issues in a different part of the garden, also surrounded by healthy looking plants. So for the time being I blame my poor skill at transplanting.