By Denise Crane

The year I planted cucumbers I had visions of sturdy vines and helping my grandchildren play “hide and seek” for cucumbers.

It wasn’t quite that way.

Maybe it was the variety of cucumbers that I planted (someone had gifted me a bag of seeds), or maybe I was just too new to growing vine things, but, the reality was, those vines were kind of scratchy. Not thorny like a rose bush, but just scratchy like “I am not sure I want my bare hands rubbing up against those vines, much less my grandchildren’s hands.” Even though the kids have adorable little garden gloves, they really prefer to use their bare hands in the garden. So, we watched the vines get started and put forth some blooms and talked about how we would cut them up and soak them in vinegar and eat them for snacks all summer.

And for a while, we did.

I had also planted tomatoes in the garden that year. I was still working on getting them to yield fruit before the heat of the summer drained them of life and was seeming to have some success. Then I went out of town for ten days.

When I came back and checked the garden, my seemingly scratchy but benign cucumber vines had run completely amok. They had fully engulfed the tomato plants, run up over the fence, covered up my strawberry plants and invaded part of the yard. They put so much energy into invading everything else around them, that there were next to no remaining cucumbers on the vine. It reminded me of a garden version of kudzu.

I went to work with my clippers. I trimmed and uncovered and re-routed. I put up some vertical supports to allow the cucumbers to climb on something other than the tomato plants and strawberries.

Nothing ever fully recovered. The cucumber seems to have gotten in a huff about having its freedom to invade curtailed. The tomatoes simply seemed confused about whether they were in a safe space. In the fall, they produced late fruit again, but not the bountiful fall harvest of before. The strawberries were about done for the season anyway and went dormant.

The lesson I learned from the cucumbers is that some species of plant are invaders. There is no ill intent on the part of those plants, they simply need some well-defined boundaries to find the balance between thriving and taking over everything. 

I try to pay close attention to when I might be invading those around me, and to accept guidance when there might be a less invasive way to move through my life that leads to good yields without harming others.