We’ve reached that part of the summer, when the heat and humidity have soared to almost unbearable levels, bins of school supplies have taken over all of the stores, and it seems like everyone I know wants to give me cucumbers.

We spent a beautiful afternoon recently with friends enjoying live music at a wine and beer garden, and of course, someone brought along homegrown cucumbers.

I should say, I like cucumbers. I enjoy them in salads, on sandwiches, on their own as a crunchy snack, and I usually won’t turn down a nice dill pickle. Most years I grow them in my garden and then when this part of the season rolls around, I try to give them away to everyone I know. 

But our garden is a little smaller this year than it has been in the past. It’s been a busy summer of travel and transition and we’ve been managing two properties as we work on renovations in our new country house and on prepping the city house for the market. I did drop some tomato and pepper plants in the ground, but that’s all I managed. 

It turns out that has not diminished our supply of homegrown cucumbers, because the average plant yields ten to twenty fruits. Now of course this varies quite a bit, but if we assume the average garden cucumber weighs a conservative half pound, the average American eats about eight and a half pounds of cucumber per year, and the average gardener plops eight cucumber plants in their garden plot, that leaves an excess of, well, quite a bit of cucumber.

We’re not talking quite the numbers Newfoundland was dealing with in the late 1980s of course. That’s when the provincial government decided to enter into the cucumber business with innovator Philip Sprung, the man who claimed his hydroponic greenhouses would revolutionize the produce industry and usher Newfoundland into previously undreamt economic prosperity. With mostly cucumbers.

This is not the Sprung Greenhouse, dubbed by the press as the “Pickle Palace.” This appears to be a less massive and more successful greenhouse full of cucumbers. Amnsalem, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The idea was that with the combination of eight interconnected greenhouses, large grow lights to extend the naturally short growing season of Newfoundland, and Sprung’s unique hydroponic solution, the project would yield fully grown, market ready cucumbers in as little as six days.

The enormous project, which employed 330 temporary and 150 permanent staff and ended up costing the taxpayers about $22.2 million, was projected to produce 6.7 million pounds of produce in its first year and expand to 9 million in its second year. It promised to quickly turn Newfoundland into a cucumber powerhouse unlike the world had ever seen.

Instead the greenhouse took much longer to produce about 800,000 cucumbers, many of them misshapen because of moisture control issues. It turned out also that there was very little market for them as the average Newfoundlander was responsible for the consumption of only about half a cucumber per year, and the Sprung cucumbers were almost twice as expensive to produce as they were to purchase. 

Everyone who is currently trying to give me cucumbers has a seriously large number of apples in their future.

In the US, a cucumber could be purchased for about a quarter of the cost of production for a Sprung cucumber, probably because every home gardener had more than enough to share. It’s probably not surprising that the project also brought down several political careers. In the end, each Sprung cucumber wound up costing the Newfoundland taxpayers about $27.50 and a good number of them were fed to livestock.

I don’t think the cucumber growers in my life have gotten that desperate yet, though there have been seasons I might have started offering my overabundance of cucumbers to any cows or pigs I happened to meet. For now, I’m grateful I have friends who are offering me the crisp, cool taste of summer without charging me a dime, much less $27.50.

Since I don’t have to try to figure out what to do with an overabundance, I’m free to live life as cool as a cucumber. At least for a few weeks until the apple harvest comes in.