The Herbarium
Part IV · Fruit & vegetable
Herb. No. 197
Cucumber
Cucumis sativus
Cucurbitaceae
A cooling kitchen fruit of the vine — eaten unripe, pickled, or sliced, and a folklore sedative that is mostly water.
Kitchen fruit. Pickling types and slicers are the same species, different habits.
- Parts used
- Unripe fruit
- Traditional notes
- Kitchen fruit · Pickle · Traditional cooling food
- Grow · USDA 6b
- Tender annual. Heat. Direct after frost, or transplants that were not rootbound. In work: May · Jun · Jul · Aug · Sep
- Harvest
- Young, often. A yellow baseball is a seed factory.
- Pick every day or the vine stops.
- A trellis keeps fruit straighter and cleaner.
Safety
Bitter cucurbit fruit Known cucumber allergy (sometimes with ragweed)
Companions
Plant with Corn, Dill, Nasturtium, Pea, Sunflower.
Keep apart from Garden sage, Potato, Rosemary.
Lore
The Roman emperor Tiberius supposedly ate them out of season from wheeled frames — an early greenhouse story. Indian kitchens pickled and raita’d them long before that. ‘Cool as a cucumber’ is 18th-century English. The water content did the work; the folklore added a nap.
The Herbarium — a teaching catalog, not a clinic. Traditional use is history, not a prescription. USDA 6b dates are a week either way, not a promise. Do not eat, drink, or harvest a plant you cannot name.