follow-up on strange behavior of cucumber plants
To all:
It should be mentioned that I have never seen this behavior of cucumber leaves folding over before. We have had cucumber plants for three years, now, and I would have remembered seeing this before. A section of a tomato plant seems to have completely wilted, as well. Several branches, and the leaves along them, turned brown completely, and dried out. This seems to have coincided with the destruction of the trees out front, too.
The day after the decimation, Friday, July 18, it rained, so there was no further work done on the trees.
On Saturday, July 19, a man arrived with a kind of portable wood chipper. He went to work on the stumps left from the two trees removed by the larger house. The cucumber leaves wilted, again, but not as much as before.
For the next week, the cucumber leaves did not fold down, although the sun was strong every day.
On Friday, July 25, we cleared a section of the garden that we had allowed to fill with any plants that seemed to come along. These included ragweed, some Morning Glory vines, and a number of tall grassy weeds. We opened up a couple of square feet of ground, tearing these out. We stayed away from the cucumbers and tomatoes, however. The next day, the 26th, the cucumber leaves folded down, again. They folded down for several days afterward. After about three days, they seemed to have stopped.
At the same time as we removed the weeds at the corner of the garden, we also tore a number of Morning Glory vines out that we had allowed to, essentially completely envelope a developing rose bush. At their height, the vines completely covered the shrub, almost like a fur coat, and Morning Glories shared space with rose buds. We had, at its height, four roses, along with the Morning Glories, decorating the bush. The vines were trimmed back, down to the ground. Since that time, the one remaining rose has wilted and been removed. No rose buds seem to have formed to replace it, however. Not only are there no other bloomed roses on the bush, now, there seem not to be any buds developing, either! There are shoots of new branches developing, with red leaves along them, but no new buds.
Another point which, frankly, can be said to have been obvious, but not apparent, has recently come out. The section of land that we use for a garden borders a strip belonging to the fire department, next door. There is no fence between them. We, however, are careful about encroaching on their land, and they take pains about our property. The fire department regularly calls in landscapers to trim their lawn. Because it’s paid for by the city, it seems they are rather too free with the landscaping. About two or three times a month we here the whine of edgers, the roar of lawn tractors and the blast of leaf blowers. It always seemed to us that literally assaulting the grass that frequently was never a good idea. The fact that their grass is brown in many spots, promptly, every summer indicates that that is right.
The last few years that we have had cucumber plants, they would all but explode in size, with their vines stretching up to almost ten feet from where they started, even to the other side of the garden. But they never enter onto the fire department’s land! It is not that their landscapers cut the vines. Being a city agency, they don’t want to take those kind of liberties. And they do not reposition them, since they never appear to change path. The vines, essentially, are growing straight out, toward the boundary with the fire house yard, then turning aside! The garden is starting to grow around the rear corner of the house, rather than enter the fire department’s yard! With what has happened so far, it is beginning to look as if they can sense the literal devastation done to the fire house’s plants, and is shunning it!
Julian Penrod