You couldn't nuke these cukes

Just a sampling

About this time last year I wrote about how we grow two things: a child and a garden. The child, unlike the garden, insists on having water daily.
This is Garden III at our house and overall it's been the most successful yet. That is more a result of a hot summer with plenty of rain than it is a product of our gardening knowledge, which is scant. We planted seeds. We watered, occasionally weeded and then waited. Wouldn't you know, everything grew: potatoes, tomatoes, peas, pea pods, beans, peppers (orange and red), carrots, onion, lettuce and cucumber.
Oh, the cucumber. Anni planted a total of six plants, hoping at least some of them would take. Well, they all did, and 80 -- yes, 80 -- cucumbers later, we're still finding them in varying stages of growth. These are the toughest plants; you cut them back and they grow twice as big. I like a good cucumber, as do the ladies here, but we haven't eaten 80 of them. Most have been given away -- at this point we plead for people to take them -- and Anni brings many to school, for the kids and the teachers.
We cut back to just three tomato plants this year, but no worries. We've got bushels of tomatoes, enough that I'm going to master the art of making tomato sauce. (If you're Italian, I'll trade you a cucumber for any sauce tips.)
Elise, as you can imagine, is perfectly content to stand in the middle of the garden and treat it like a salad bar.
The other day we were digging potatoes. I dug up a spud the size of a softball, handed it to her to put in a bowl. She took one look at it, her eyes got big and she said, "Wow."
A few minutes later I looked in the bowl and one of the potatoes had suspicious little teeth marks.
Elise played innocent, but the dirt all around her mouth suggested otherwise.