 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. In today's video we are going to be talking about Cucamalans and I'm going to be showing you how to start them from seed and grow them all the way to pickles. So I have my grandson Henderson here who is going to help me taste these at the end of the video but first of all I'm going to show you how to plant these from seed all the way to harvest and I will also show you how I pickled these. So let's watch that first and at the end of the video we will crack these open and give them a taste test. Today I'm going to be planting up some what I like to think of as more of the exotic varieties of cucumbers. We've got the Cucamalans which is one that I have failed at miserably so far. They do recommend a Cucamalans to be started indoors. Cucamalans require a quite warm environment to get going according to the instructions here. You will find if you do some research on Cucamalans they have a lot of different names such as the mouse melon, the Mexican gherkin, I've seen Mexican watermelon and they do kind of resemble a tiny little watermelon if you can see that there. They say that they have a kind of a cucumber lime flavor which sounds good. I think these would be really great just to snack on or to have in salads. My plan is to plant these up in these large I would say these are like a five inch type container. I want to get just one plant sprouted and growing in each of these containers. Keep it in here as long as I can and then transplant them into containers that will go outside. So you always want to make sure that the soil that you are starting your seeds in is well saturated and moistened. It's not bad but I should have maybe wet it down a little bit before I put it in these containers. So another method you can do is just to place it in some kind of a container here and add a couple inches of water. Just let these containers sit for 20 minutes or so to soak up as much water as they can and then once we plant the seeds we can also do a good spray over the surface of the soil as well. So my goal is to just have one plant going in each of these containers. So I'm going to do my three seed method just to ensure germination. So we'll start off with the cucumbers. You can see they're very tiny. They almost look like a sesame seed to me. So I'm going to just make a hole about a quarter inch deep not too deep. And I'm going to plant them all fairly close to the center of this container. And once I have germination and they get a little bigger past that two leaf stage I will remove two of them and just keep the strongest of the three. So that's pretty much it as far as the planting part of this goes. There's nothing too technical about planting your cucumber seeds. I'm going to give each of these a good spritzing on the top. So I expect to see germination here with these cucumbers within 7 to 14 days. And this is the cucumber melon. I got three sprouting here now so I'm pretty excited about that. So I will plan to put these in the container with a good trellising system because I believe the cucumber melons really are a viney plant. So I'm looking forward to potting this in another month or so. So even though this plant doesn't look that great I got looking here and we do have some small tiny cucumber melon fruits coming here. So that's exciting. Hopefully the bees will come along and help with pollination. So here is what the cucumber melon plant looks like about mid-July so it is really vining out. It's grabbing on to the cage of my lemon cucumber. So this here is my cucumber melon that I had started indoors from seed. I'd screw that and this lemon cucumber also from seed. I really thought this was fun to grow. There's lots of baby cucumbers on here now. So we've tasted a few of these cucumber melons. They have a bit of a kind of a lemony cucumber taste I think. And I think they would make great with pickles. So I'm going to try and see if I can get enough to fill with a small jar or two and make some cucumber melon pickles. Do you want to put it in the bucket? Thank you. Let's find some more. Good job. It's got a really look. I'm going to find a whole bunch of them. We can get a jar or maybe make some little baby pickles. Okay so to make your cucumber melon pickles the process is basically the same process and recipe you would use for making any kind of basic pickle. So I'm just going to run through the ingredients that I'm going to be using here today. So of course we have our cucumber melons. I've sterilized a jar here. I'm only going to be making one jar. And going in there I'm going to be using some fresh garlic dill and some chopped up green onion. I just pulled a few from the garden for supper so I thought I'll just use some of the bits of green onion here to go into the brine as well. And the basic brine that I'm going to be doing is going to be a one-to-one ratio of vinegar and water. And then I'll be adding some sea salt. I'm going to add a little turmeric. I have just a little bit left here. Just gives it a nice color. And I have some pickling spices here as well. So these kind of things that you put into your basic brine of the vinegar and water is totally optional. So if you are not a dill person or if you want to have a little more heat in your pickles you could add some you know hot peppers. I have a variety of different pickling spices you know mustard seed, dill seed, celery seed those kind of things can also go into your brine as well. So we are ready to get this all put together now. So if you wanted to have like an actual recipe of how to put together a brine I usually do a one-to-one ratio of the vinegar. So one cup of water, one cup of vinegar, one tablespoon of coarse salt or a sea salt and optional would be one tablespoon of sugar. So because I'm just doing a small batch here today with only one jar I think doing one cup of water and vinegar will end up with a lot of brine. Then again also the brine is something that can be used if you're going to be making other pickles over the next you know month or so you can make this brine up and any that you don't use in one batch you can use for another batch. So but for today I am just going to do probably just a half a cup of the vinegar and the water. So I'm just using some ground up Himalayan pink sea salt in mine and a little bit of white sugar. Just said I only have a little bit of turmeric left here. I'm just going to add that in here for a little color. Then I'm just going to put about a half, half a tablespoon of some pickling spices. So while this is just heating up now we can get our jar of cucumbers ready for the brine. So this is my first time ever making cucumbers and actually growing cucumbers. I've never grown them before. I've tasted a few of these just raw out of the garden. They got kind of a unique lemony type cucumber taste to them. A little bit tart. So I'm going to start off by putting half of this clove of garlic and a few sprigs of the dill here in the bottom because it's a pretty big jar. I'm going to kind of split this stuff halfway up and these are my washed cucumbers. I'm just going to fill the jar halfway and just add a little bit more dill. A little bit of this green onion. So I'm very excited to see what these taste like. I just think they make such a great size little pickle. They also are known as the Mexican sour gherkin. So they do kind of remind me of those little gherkin pickles that you can buy in the store. So I'm hoping these turn out good. Okay so I have the brine here. It's got kind of a nice yellow color to it from the turmeric and I'm just going to slowly fill this up. So get it just right to the top here and then we're going to try and get some of the make sure we get all the air bubbles out of here just by taking the end of a spoon or some kind of a straw or stick. You can kind of get all the air bubbles out. That should be good. We've got it completely covered and I'm just going to let this cool down to room temperature on the counter overnight and then I'm going to put it in the fridge and we will be giving these a taste test in the next day or two. Okay so we are ready to try some of our cucumber melon pickles. They're very cute little things. So Henderson has always been very willing to try new things. He's eating a lot of things out of my garden. Let's see what he thinks of the cucumber melon. The pickled cucumber melon. Are they a bit sour? Usually you like pickles. Give it a good try. The first bite is kind of tart hey. Let me try them. I'm going to try taking one right out of the jar and just eating it whole. Okay like this. Mmm you can really taste the dill. They're kind of nice because they're kind of crunchy right. I like them. You can get the hint of garlic is there as well. There's yours. I think this would be really good with cheese or something. A little hors d'oeuvre pickle. Not bad. Yeah. Okay so I hope you enjoyed watching this video. If you've never tried growing cucumber melons I hope you will and I highly suggest making them into dilly pickles or whatever flavor you prefer. So thank you for watching my video. If you'd like to leave a comment hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to my channel. Thanks for watching. You know what? I better cut it in half for you okay. I don't want you to choke on it.