About your monster cuke, I'd say that maybe the variety is best when picked at that size but perhaps can grow larger. I usually pick a lot of fruit from my cukes for a good 2 months. Once they get fairly old, their production goes down quite a bit--although they still do produce a few a week.

You'll have to keep us posted on fruit production. I only grow cukes to make sweet midgets and am having troubles finding a variety that provides the massive amount of tiny cukes I need all at once.

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Sarah - Zone 5b/6

thx longy! I was myself looking for a good variety for tiny pickles

Shawn, every time I've planted pickling cukes, I've gotten what my Granddaughter & I call "sleepers", like you describe. I think they're ones that just get hidden real well behind the leaves because they're so close to the same shade of green, that you simply miss seeing them until they're monsters! (Happens to strawberries, too, even though we don't pick them when they're still green! We always start over at the beginning when we pick & go through it all twice, as there's always some "sleepers" hiding from us.)

I gave up trying to raise cukes for pickling, because they can get so big, so fast, that it seems like they're always ready when I'm not! I still plant them though, & use them just for eating like Weezie does, & for putting in salads.

I'm curious though, about if the monster you found had any other cukes on the same plant. If a stray seed found its way into your Alibi package, every cuke on that particular plant should be like that. (Otherwise, it's just a sleeper... & they DO get big, seemingly over night, if you dont catch them when they're small enough to fit in the pickle jar!)

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