Cucumbers make great additions to salads, and are a juicing staple. You can ferment the cucumber pickle variety to make your own crunchy dill pickles! Be sure to remove any floating row cover from the plants once they begin to flower so that bees can pollinate them. All cucurbits produce only male flowers at first, so no fruit will mature from the first flowers. The female flowers mature next and have tiny cucumbers at the end of the stem and before the flower. Any fruit that have not been properly pollinated will be shrunken and shriveled at the flower end. Remove these from the plant so it may flower again.
