European Cucumbers

Available March-November

English cucumbers have great flavour and taste great in salads, sandwiches, and make amazing pickles and relish because they are seedless! Our cucumbers can be in your supermarket within 1-3 days from picking.

Selecting the best: Look for cucumbers that are firm and evenly coloured.  But don’t squeeze them! This will shorten their shelf-life.  Cucumbers can last up to a couple weeks.  (Hint: If you see cucumbers going yellow they’re probably old.  We clean out our coolers 2-3 times a week minimum. So you can be sure they were fresh when they left our dock;).

Storing: Always wrap your cucumbers tightly and store in the refrigerator after cutting portions.  This will keep the cucumber fresh and crisp.  Afraid of leftovers going bad? Try our Mini cucumbers!

WHY ARE CUCUMBERS WRAPPED IN PLASTIC?

While the cucumber is on the plant the vine keeps the cucumber full of nutrients and water.  And just like all plants, cucumber plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.  This is called respiration.  When plants respire, or breath out, they also let out some of their moisture into the air.  When you pick a cucumber from the vine it continues to respire, but it can’t get more water because it’s no longer connected to the vine.  A cucumber with a thin skin lets out more moisture than one with a thick skin when it’s picked.

So greenhouse cucumbers start out nice and crispy when they are picked.  But after a day or so they can become floppy and squishy and not very tasty to eat.  That’s why greenhouse cucumbers are wrapped in plastic.  It protects your food from things that could easily get in through the thin skin, and keeps the moisture in so your cucumber is crunchy and delicious when you get it in the store.

Cucumbers are wrapped for a bunch of reasons:

1. To keep your food safe. It keeps the bad stuff from permeating the thin skin and contaminating your food.
2. To keep your food fresh. It keeps the good stuff in.  A wrapped cucumber will only lose 1.5% of weight through evaporation after 14 days.  But it only takes 3 days to lose 3.5% of its weight if left unwrapped!  And nobody wants to eat a squishy cucumber.
3. To reduce waste. This is a big deal.  If we don’t wrap the cucumbers, more will go bad between the farm and your grocery basket, and have to be thrown away.  If more cucumbers go to waste, farmers will have to grow more cucumbers just to fill the existing demand for this delicious and healthy snack.  That means using more inputs like seeds, water and energy, not to mention significant transport costs for more product, which would be a huge waste.  So this little bit of plastic helps us reduce a pile of waste.

Inventors and scientists are working hard to find a new kind of natural wrapper for greenhouse cucumbers that is safe to be used with food.  We’re excited to see what they come up with.