Jay Tracy was just trying to solve a problem: He wanted to identify which cucumber varieties might perform best in hot, dry Tucson, Ariz., where he lived in 2009.
Traditional cucumbers didn’t like it much there, especially in summer. And while he’d had better luck with the basic long, straight Armenian type, he wasn’t crazy about its texture. What else should he try?
Answering that question has taken him time-traveling through botanical and cultural history dating as far back as ancient Egypt — and has turned Mr. Tracy into a devoted foster parent to more than 50 cucumber varieties and counting.
Many of them bear little resemblance in shape or flavor to the generic supermarket model (Cucumis sativus), with its thick, waxy skin. Mr. Tracy has found himself deep in the world of cucumber melons: varieties of muskmelon (Cucumis melo) that are bred to be harvested and eaten immature, and are genetically closer to a cantaloupe or honeydew than a cucumber.
Think of them this way: “It’s a melon grown like a zucchini — meant to be picked at a young stage and eaten like a cucumber,” Mr. Tracy said. “They are melons botanically, and cucumbers agriculturally.”
It turns out that “cucumber” doesn’t cover the range of eccentricities expressed among everything labeled with that name any more than the word “tomato” conjures up the image of every single tomato, as if they were all uniform red globes.
Some cucumber melons in Mr. Tracy’s collection — offered alongside choice C. sativus types in his online Cucumber Shop since 2019 — are long and twisted like snakes. Others are oval, or fat little globes like Carosello Tondo Massafra, which has firm flesh and few seeds. Many fall somewhere in between — like the nearly white Palestinian Fakous, with its fine-textured flesh inside six- or seven-inch fruits.
The cucumber melons’ thinner skin — no peeling required — may be smooth, ridged or fuzzy, covered in the finest hairs, and dark or pale green, approaching white. (One, the white-fruited Pupuneddhra Bianca, may surprise growers by occasionally producing dark green fruits on some vines.)
A highlight of the diversity of cucumber melons in his care: “They are never bitter, and always easy on the digestion.”
Making Cucumber Connections
Mr. Tracy, 44, an itinerant teacher of the deaf for his county office of education, now lives less than an hour north of San Francisco, in Fairfield, Calif., with his wife and four teenagers — and an extra refrigerator loaded with pounds of heirloom cucumber seed. Much of it is not from variations on the common cucumber, but from those cucumber melons.
This seed stash represents the progeny of a treasure hunt that has seen Mr. Tracy forge international friendships online, particularly in the Apulian region of southeastern Italy. He has made domestic connections, too, with adventurous American seed-keepers like Culinary Breeding Network and Experimental Farm Network, and has read countless obscure research papers on the Cucurbitaceae, as well as textbooks on growing and saving seed.
He has also waded into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s gene bank of agricultural crops to request seed. A recent find there: the exceptionally drought-tolerant Ayra cucumber indigenous to Rajasthan, India, which has the strange distinction of producing pinkish sap that dries red. Who could resist?
Along the way, he has found cucumbers that will stand up to a range of garden conditions. And he has found himself on a campaign, as he put it: “To help people discover cucumbers that have been here all along.”
Simplifying the Taxonomic Tangle
The earliest examples of C. sativus in literature or drawings that he has learned about, Mr. Tracy said, are from about 1300, after the species made its way to Europe along a trade route from India. Any cucumber references before that are probably to C. melo, which likely traces its history back to Egypt. That means that “in biblical texts, we’re talking about cucumber melons,” he said.
Like a rambunctious cucumber vine, the cucumber melons — not to be confused with the trending Mexican sour gherkins or cucamelons (Melothria scabra), a New World Cucurbit — are a bit of a taxonomic tangle.
A gardener could simply slice them this way: There are the long ones, like the Armenian cucumber and its closest kin, that “a lot of the world would call snake melons,” Mr. Tracy said. Those are in the flexuosus group (C. melo var. flexuosus), and generally grow on plants with a vining habit, like Light Armenian, a very early producer with slightly grooved skin.
The shorter ones, cultivated mostly in southern Italy over many centuries, are C. melo var. chate, usually just called Carosello, and tend to be mostly bush forms. The story goes that the name, meaning carousel, was bestowed by a seed company wanting an easier-to-pronounce version of the local dialect for Carosino, the small town credited with first cultivating them.
Mr. Tracy’s most popular cucumber is Striped Carosello Leccese, which has skin marked in mottled, darkish bands. Its four- to six-inch fruits have a crisp but tender texture, and a slightly sweet aftertaste.
What’s important: All cucumber melons crave heat, right from the start. To get a jump on things, Mr. Tracy sprouts the seed in a moist, folded paper towel inside a plastic bag, at a temperature of about 80 degrees. Once the seed sprouts, he transplants each seedling into a soil block or cell of seed-starting mix in his greenhouse — or outside, in the ground, if the weather has thoroughly warmed.
At the other end of the season, unless you’re growing for seed, he recommends picking early for best eating — and being guided by fruit diameter rather than length. The cylindrical fruits, like many of the Carosello and also the snake melons, are best at about one and a half to two inches across. With the round Carosellos, three to four inches is ideal.
“You can let it go a little longer,” he said, “but the quality is better at that state.”
It Takes a Village
Tracking down, growing and selling historic cucumbers isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, nor is it a backyard project, exactly. It’s more of an act of faith and passion. (And lest this seem an unusual hobby, Mr. Tracy’s two earlier, serious ones — raising reptiles and then praying mantises — win hands down.)
“It is all a labor of love,” he said. “Love for the people who have since passed on, and an appreciation for all they went through to develop each individual variety; love for each variety I steward; and most of all, a love for those who continue to carry on the legacy of these cucumbers and shared them.”
Only a portion of his 10-by-20-foot backyard vegetable garden is sunny enough to suit the task. And anyway, cucumbers are promiscuous sorts, inclined to cross-pollinate (usually assisted by bees) if planted near another variety of the same species, muddying the genetics.
“Whether the varieties produce short or long fruits,” Mr. Tracy said, “if you were to grow them side by side, they would cross.”
Isolation is essential to yield seed that is true to type, and that’s his goal: to track down, stabilize and distribute authentic versions of these living pieces of history.
Each variety that he wants to grow for a fresh crop of seed — about a dozen each year — therefore needs its own space. That has been possible only thanks to friends who make room in their own gardens and through small contracts with nearby farmers.
As each crop gradually produces fruit, Mr. Tracy begins the process of selection, to identify which plants express the unique traits that have characterized that variety through its history — a process that can take multiple generations. He puts a fruit from each plant to the taste test to evaluate its eating quality and notes other desired traits, pulling plants that don’t make the cut (or those that display signs of disease) and leaving the best to mature.
Saving Seed: Adventures in the Man Cave
The Cucumber Shop company headquarters is in what Mr. Tracy’s wife, Melanie, calls the man cave — a dry bar off the family room where he packs orders, stockpiles fruit for seed and then processes it.
To harvest cucumber melon seed, the fruits must be left to grow on the vine way past the eating stage, “so that they look like a melon,” he said.
He brings the fruit inside to a cool, dry place to let it sit “until it starts to smell really fruity,” he said. Each one is slit open lengthwise to get at the seeds, which are washed in a colander to rinse out the pulp, and then dried thoroughly and refrigerated.
While Mr. Tracy is still a fairly young man, he is already thinking ahead. As part of insuring a stable future for these cherished varieties, some seed will go to other catalogs, and from there into the farms and gardens of their customers. Uprising Seeds in Washington State, with a special interest in traditional Italian varieties, is stewarding Light Green Carosello Leccese. Hoss Tools, in Georgia, and San Diego Seed Company, in California, both list some.
Once their customers try a cucumber melon, Mr. Tracy is confident that they’ll return for more, the way local market farmers who grow his unusual varieties have done.
“Their customers see it and say, ‘Oooh, that’s different,’ and try it,” he said. “And then they don’t want the other cucumbers any longer.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
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