Cucumber: Attack of the aphids

This thing died in record time. We went on small vacation for a week and came back to find our cucumber plant suffering a serious aphid infestation. I sprayed it with some homemade anti-bug juice (garlic and chilli-pepper water, more or less) and that seemed to help reduce the amount of insects. But the cucumber plant didn’t recover and in the end I removed it to reduce any risk of the disease spreading to other plants. We had tomatoes along side it in the greenhouse and I didn’t want those to get infected as well.

28 days later. Infected.

I suspect Cucumber Mosaic Virus, since it’s known to be spread by aphids. I’m not really sure, since this is my first experience with an unhealthy plant (last year everything went smoothly and we didn’t really have any sick plants).

Seeing as CMV can spread to other plants like courgettes, pumpkins and tomatoes, I decided to completely remove this plant, even though it was still producing a few small cucumbers. I pulled out everything, dug out the roots a bit, and cleared any leaves from the ground. I put it in a garbage bag and threw it away somewhere outside the garden facility. You can transmit the virus quite easily (just by touching one plant and then moving to another) and it can linger in soil or compost, so I didn’t add it to  the compost bucket.

The spot where it was growing now has a table on over it, and I won’t grow anything right in that area this year. I actually don’t know if I’m just being paranoid, or if this drastic action is necessary. But might as well play it safe. This plant died in the space of about 2 weeks and I don’t want that happening to other plants.

Since I’ve just started this blog a couple months ago there hasn't been much traffic. But if people ever starting looking at this site, maybe somebody can give me their opinion as to what happened to this cucumber plant.

Cheers.


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Edit: After some research, I found the real reason this plant died.

We Made Cheese

Cheese is awesome. I know that it doesn’t really have anything to do with gardening, but I still felt like posting this anyway. This is the first time we tried making cheese and it was actually pretty easy. It turned out well and was good on crackers. This definitely turned out more as a snack cheese rather than a sandwich cheese though.

We used a liter of whole milk and a liter of buttermilk. After sterilizing the pan, the milk is heated to about 30⁰ C. The rennet gets added at this point. Rennet is the stuff that causes curds and whey to separate. Usually its taken from the stomach lining of a calf. I’ve got microbial rennet in powder form, which seems to work just as well. One half teaspoon mixed in 10 ml of salt water beforehand was enough.

Curds and whey

After the curds are split you can drain the whey out through cheesecloth. We made a small press out of a few cans to get a round shape and make the cheese denser. There are also some herbs and salt added before we put it into the press to add flavor. We pressed it for a couple hours and put it in a salt bath overnight for a stronger taste.

So this is the result. Tasted good. I know I said it isn't really a cheese for bread, but here's a picture with some homemade bread anyway. There’s loads of information online about making different cheeses. This was very simple. There are also methods of washing the curds and aging for weeks or months to get harder cheeses. If I have some time I’m going to try to make some ‘real’ cheese, like gouda or something.