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Garden Synchronicity: Defective Cucumbers and Resistance to Change

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I started a garden for the first time last year (2011). I wasn't very good at it, but I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. I learned that planting flowers with the vegetables helps attract beneficial insects. I learned that too much water can be just as bad as not enough. I also learned that plants grow better when organic material (a.k.a. compost) is tilled into the soil. So at the end of last year, I put all of the garden and yard waste in a compost bin. Rotten tomatoes, corn stalks, grass clippings, fallen leaves, and dried sunflower plants all went into the bin. When spring came, I dumped out the compost bin and used a roto-tiller to mix it all into the garden patch. As a process improvement over last year's garden, I actually had a plan for Garden 2012. I knew that I didn't want any more sunflowers, because they blocked out the sun for other plants. I knew that I wanted cucumbers, so I bought premium seeds and planted them in the northeast corner o