I don’t know that anyone noticed, but I missed my self-imposed Monday blog deadline. I’ve been in Charlotte, hanging out with these two cuties.

They’re on vacation between regular school-year preschool and summer preschool. Their mom, my daughter, works from home and needed help keeping busy, busy toddlers safely busy.  My pleasure….

On another note, talk about traffic. Whew!  I came home yesterday, hitting Raleigh around five o’clock.  (I know, bad timing; ever so often I forget to avoid the nightmare of rush hour on the Beltline.)

My usual route, I-540, was shut down to one lane due to a traffic accident, or so the flashing sign on I-40 East said. Rats!  Rush-hour traffic + one less way around Raleigh available = MAJOR TRAFFIC JAM.  We may not have loads of restaurants, theaters, and sports events in Rocky Mount, but we don’t have to contend with ALL THAT TRAFFIC either.

But I’m home now, back East, where my laid-back summer life can resume. I’ve checked on my backyard crops, and the cucumber plants have a few blooms.  The vines haven’t really taken off yet like they do some years, spilling over from the edge of the shrub bed into the adjoining yard. I hope I’m not in for a slim crop this year.  I’ve been looking forward to having cucumbers to share with family and neighbors.

Plus, having a bumper cucumber crop is a point of pride for me. You see, cucumbers and I go way back.  When I was a kid growing up in Edgecombe County, one of my summer jobs was picking cucumbers that were sold for pickling (see last Sunday’s column:  http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/Patsy-Pridgen/2018/06/03/What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation.html).

I guess I consider myself something of a cucumber expert since I learned that

• while growing, cucumbers need a lot of water so as not to turn bitter,
• when conditions are right, cucumbers grow very quickly and require constant picking,
• smaller cucumbers fetch more money at the cucumber sorting station than large ones.

Need I go on? I’m sure I can wrack my brain for more cucumber trivia, but let me leave you with a picture of my hill of squash. I’m expanding my shrub bed gardening this year.