At the URI Master Gardener Demonstration Vegetable garden we have found that wide-spaced netting (the holes are about 4 inches square) works very well and is easy to erect. This stuff is made of a synthetic material and can be used year after year. Available in gardening catalogs and some garden centers.

Where there's cukes, there's gotta be dill. The dill that I planted years ago plagues me now. It's coming up through everything, especially through my lavender. They must be good companions in the plant world.

Back to the point. For recipes, I ALWAYS go to my Ball Jar recipe book, which has a great recipe for dill pickles. I use it every year and people rave about the pickles. I make pickled beets using their recipe, too, in October that friends and family wait patiently 11 weeks for as the beets pickle in the jars. I give them away as Christmas gifts. I found a link to get
that book here.

You'll never want to lend it out.

How do you water under that black plastic?

Maybe there is no need to water. I am constantly amazed at the amount of water some of my neighbors dump on their yards. I do practically zero watering and you'd need a microscope to tell the difference between our yards in terms of greenness except when we have a real heat wave, and then my yard bounces back afterwards.

Maybe the black plastic acts as a mulch. Although, I have to say, I prefer organic mulches. Something about plastic just seems the opposite to me of what gardens are all about. I was reading a few days ago that regular plastic will still be in landfills hundreds of thousands of years from now. Is this plastic more biodegradable?

Thinly sliced cukes, 1/8 inch thick, with a thin salad dressing make a nice salad by themselves. By thin, I'm trying to say not Thousand Island but more like oil and vinegar and a few spices.

We water only at the base of each plant using a hose. This saves water because we're not applying it to the whole garden area, only to where it's needed.