I'll sing down that cucumber, baby

The lemon cucumber plant has been putting a lot out there. I'm not sure why I planted lemon cucumber instead of a normal kind, I think I'd been given to understand that they take up less room. But they're taking up a fuckload of room, and it's been a struggle to keep them from overwhelming the tomatoes; the fuckers grow so fast. They're growing only slightly less fast now as they fruit, and we ate the first one yesterday. Fucking awesome. It might be because it was fresh off the vine but it was way better than any of the cucumber varieties I've ever bought, and I'll even daresay better than the standard big green cukes Dad drew in the back garden, which were seedier. These lemon cucumbers are real fleshy motherfuckers, and picked young, not too seedy - just a lovely tennis-ball sized lump of cucumber flesh with a slightly richer taste than the long green ones.

(Incidentally, Paul Theroux wrote in the Pillars of Hercules that in Turkey, the word 'cucumber' has become inextricably linked to its idiomatic meaning, penis, in a way that makes me think of our word 'cock' - people avoid saying it in its literal meaning because it's so very suggestive. While we have some synonyms to choose from, like rooster or chanticleer, because heaven knows I fall all over myself to say 'chanticleer' when cock will do, in Turkey they'll make allusive references instead, like 'green salad things.' And when there's a fake bomb scare, the defusers will often open the suspicious package and find a cucumer with a note pinned to it: "This is what you are." I wonder if that's true, I can't find it on the Internets.)

Anyways, feeling quite smug about how yummy the lemon cucumbers are because apparently they need to be eaten fresh off the vine, going soggy and gross three days after picking, which is why they aren't commercially grown and sold, I've heard from somewhere. And we have a supply on our back balcony. Sweet. I always wonder about unsellable foods like that. I've heard there are a kajillion banana varieties, for example, most of them inexpressibly delicious, and we just get the one we get because it's the only one that tolerates being picked green, transported, and sold weeks and weeks after harvesting - I've heard pawpaw is fucking amazing, for example, and grows in temperate climates - even up close to where I was living in Toronto - but that it goes off so fast no one sells it. Someday I will have a big big garden and eat like a queen . . . but at the moment I'm thrilled with the one lemon cucumber we ate yesterday.

Generally speaking the back balcony garden is going stupendously, though I don't want to count my tomatoes and cucumbers before they're plucked. It's sheltered from the wind but gets quite good sunlight, as good as you can get in this fucking wet pig of a country, so I should count my blessings. But Croatia went a fair way to making me sicker of this place than I already was.