Legislation related to cucumbers

Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 of 15 June 1988 laying down quality standards for cucumbers. To the readers of this blog it may be interesting, I suppose, primarily from the philological point of view. As fits a EU document, over the 26 years since the quality standards for cucumbers have been laid down, they have been translated into 20-plus national languages of the European Union, all the translations being available at the URL above. (The Irish Gaelic and Croatian are disappointing omissions; I suppose Croatian readers will have to make do with the Slovenian, Slovak, and Bulgarian translations).

By comparing the translations, one can note to see the "Great Cucumber Divide", a line running from the North Sea to the Adriatic and dividing the continent in half. Almost everywhere in the Eastern, Northern, and Central Europe, the word for "cucumber" is a derivative of the Greek αγγούρια ("unripe"; all examples here and below are in plural, and in an oblique case); cf. German Gurken, Swedish gurka (similarly in other Germanic languages, except for English), Czech okurky, Slovak uhorky (similarly elsewhere in West and East Slavic), Latvian gurķiem, Finnish kurkkujen, etc.

Admittedly there is a strange non-αγγούρια island in the Balkans, with the Bulgarian краставици and obviously related Romanian castraveți. (Outside of the EU directive, we also find the same word in Albanian (kastravecë), Maceodnian, and Serbian/Croatian). So in this case the Balkan Sprachbund has a common word, but it is not the same Greek word that's common throughout half the Europe!

The south-western half of Europe is much less homogeneous. Spanish and Portuguese have pepinos, which comes, ultimately, from the Greek πέπων "melon" (as does the English pumpkin).

The English cucumber, via the French concombre is said to be derived from the Latin cucumis. In Italian, this word survived too, as cocomero, but there it is more likely to mean "watermelon" than "cucumber"; the apparently more standard Italisn word for "cucumber" preferred by the EU bureaucrats id cetriolo, which also happens to be a Greek loanword - with the original Greek meaning "citron"!

After a few really warm days...

* First bamboo shoots seen today. The old bamboo canes are apparently all dead after the last super-cold winter, but we'll have new ones...
* Volunteer tomato seedling sprout in the beds where tomatoes were grown last year. (We treat them as useless, since we'll have much bigger tomato seedlings grown indoor. In Indiana, you can let volunteer tomato seedling grow into a real plant, and it usually will bring fruit, but it will do so a month or two later than transplanted seedlings)
* New mint stems and leaves appeared above the ground. I was wondering if mint had been fully killed by the cold winter, but no, it has not.

Asparagus

The first shoots of asparagus emerged above the ground a couple days ago. It's a been a long, cold winter, and a later spring...

Is the voice of the (snapping) turtle heard in our land yet?

If it is, the spring must be hear. When planting tender plants, gardeners rely on the "average last frost" dates in their calendars, but an unexpectedly late frost, often ruinous, is always possible. Wise farmers have various rule of the thumbs to figure when one should plant in a particular year. None of them, however, sounds better to me than this piece of advice shared by Susan Weisand, who grows hot chili peppers in southern Indiana, in a recent issue of the 812 Magazine:

Animals know the land better than you do.
I don’t plant until I see that my snapping turtle has laid her eggs in the spring. If she’s not out, I’m not planting.

(Photo of the snapping turtle by Willy Logan)

Now, where do I get a snapping turtle?

First frost, again

Sweet potatoes: in the ground... This year, the spring in southern Indiana was very early, with shirtsleeves weather by mid-March. The first frost also came a bit earlier (around Oct 9) than the last year. Just a light patchy frost, completely killing only the "subtropical" type plants, such as the silk melon (AKA loofah 丝瓜), bitter melon (苦瓜), winter melon (冬瓜), the vines of sweet potatoes (山芋). This of course is a signal to harvest your
... and out.

The first frost - now for real

The "official" reports showed the low of only -1 C last night (Oct 29/30) here in Bloomington, Indiana, but that was enough to put the end to the growing season for the warm-weather crops. Tomato plants are dead all over town. Morning glory and basil mostly did not survive this either.

About time, I guess...

Some of our pepper plants, surprisingly, are still more or less alive. Perhaps, planting them on a slope helped a bit; also, the plants were somewhat sheltered from above by bean vines on the fence.

Now - as it so often the case - the forecast is for a few much warmer days. But that will only be of interest to cabbages, radishes and such.

The first frost (almost)

Time to harvest me!

The clear night of Oct 21/22 saw the first, very light, frost in parts of Bloomington, Indiana. Official data showed the low of -1 C (+30 F) that night, but obviously it varied between locations.

It was interesting to see its effect of such a "marginal" frost in the garden, as it provides an opportunity to see a fine difference between the sensitivity of different plants, or in the microclimate between different locations in the yard.

Even though peppers are generally said to be hardier than tomatoes, our sweet peppers and jalapeños were unscathed, but a few of the cherry tomato plants, growing near the lowest point of the garden were lightly "burned".

Too old for silk melon, to young for loofah...

The end has come for the two last melon/squash species in the garden. The winter melon (冬瓜) vines, on the ground, were killed, and so were most leaves of the silk melon (a.k.a loofah; 丝瓜) climbing on the fence and trees. The remaining fruit of both were, though intact. (The winter melon probably will be quite useful, but the silk melons appear to be at that awkward stage when they are too hard to eat, but have not yet dried to be conveniently made into loofah for the shower use). The vines of all other melons/squash plants we had had died many weeks ago, in August-Septmeber, God knows why - maybe it was too dry, maybe it was just their natural life cycle.

We had a couple cucumber plants planted in August as an experiment, trying to see if it is possible to obtain a second crop of cucumbers. That did not really work out: the plants struggled during the hot August, and now died with the first frost, producing all of half a cucumber between them.

A few of the morning glory leaves were burned by this mini-frost too, but, interestingly, they were mostly the leaves on top of the fence where the morning glory lives. So the effect in that area must have been not so much from the cold air, but from radiative cooling.

The okra, even though always considered a warm-climate plant, looks more or less alright - although it's pretty useless during the cooler part of the fall, producing hardly any pods anymore. (Not like in the summer, when a pod needs to be picked within a few days after blooming, lest it becomes too tough).

Beans are doing pretty well, so far...

Everything else still looks fine - even most of peppers, tomatoes and beans (growing on a slope, as well as most peppers; this may have helped them a bit; of course, their days are counted now...), as well as the hardier leaf vegetables (various brassica species, radishes, lettuce etc, as well as various ornamentals).

Well, it's only days until the first real frost, probably...

Wuhan's seedy side

An array of seed shops in Zhongshan Lu

It is common for Chinese cities to have shops specializing in a particular type of products to concentrate in a particular small area of the city. There is a street in Yangzhou full of cell phone shops, blocks in Guangzhou where every shop cells electronic components, and of course there are garment districts. But in Wuhan's central Zhongshan St, just a block north of the gigantic Wuchang Railway Station, there is something that may surprise many an urbanite: an entire block of shops - several dozens of them - selling vegetable seeds. With the train station nearby, and a bus station across the street, the place apparently is convenient enough for customers arriving from rural areas.

Beans etc. sold in bulk

Inside a seed shop in Nanjing

A surprisingly large array of seeds are sold in small packets: on the outside, not much bigger than those familiar to North American or Australian backyard gardeners, but loaded rather more generously. (Something like 10 grams of seeds, while an American retailer these days would often sell seeds in milligrams!) Many packets sport mysterious names of innumerable Chinese greens and beans that are often seen in China's farmers markets and restaurants, but rarely elsewhere. Other packets, although full of text, don't even seem to name the vegetable in question - apparently, the seed companies feel that the picture is enough. Many such small packets are priced at just Y1-3 (US$0.15-0.50), although some varieties cost quite a bit more. Some seeds, especially larger ones (such as corn), appear in progressively bigger packets, up to 1 kg in weight; watermelon seeds appear in cute little cans. Others (beans etc) are sold in bulk, some by weight, some by count. For example, the huge dao dou 刀豆 beans, a.k.a. jackbeans, went four for Y1 in one of the shops; that would be about 25 beans for $1.

I would be curious to know to which extent Chinese farmers rely on shops like this to get their seed supply every year (after all, some are hybrid varieties, and the packages often say that you can't save seeds), and to which extent they would just come to a shop like this just one to buy some new variety, intending to save the seeds in future years. In any event, the trade appears brisk enough, both in August and in February.

Some vegetables however, can't be started with material from a seed shop: you apparently need to be a farmer who knows another farmer... Luhao (芦蒿), a prized specialty of the lower Yangtze area (tastes a bit like asparagus to me) is said to propagate only by root material, rather than by seeds. Although shanyao (山药; something that looks like a remarkably long and rather expensive radish, and tastes to me rather like a potato) is propagated by seeds, its seeds are said not to be commonly available commercially either.

Wuhan, of course, is not unique. Other cities have such seed shop blocks too: Nanjing's is in the market at Dong Fang Cheng 60 (less than a kilometer east of the Eastern Bus Station), and reportedly Hong Kong has an area like this as well, in Sheung Wan Connaught Road West. While places like this are interesting to visit for their educational value, if you actually intend to take some seeds outside China, it is advisable to become aware of your country's applicable quarantine laws and regulation.