Creeping Cucumber
These plants want full sun, but can make do with partial shade. They grow much as a cucumber plant grows by either creeping along the ground or climbing upwards using whatever it finds for support.
The fruits taste like cucumbers and are perfectly edible until they start to ripen in turn from looking like a small watermelon into a dark purple/black color. At which point they gain a strong laxative effect... very strong!
As I mentioned the fruit looks like miniature watermelons just smaller. Only about an inch long and just a little longer than they are wide. They taste like cucumbers and can be eaten raw straight off the plant or mixed in with a salad.
The flowers of the plant are small and yellow. The leaves also look like cucumber plant's leaves. Be careful because you might find a wild cucumber plant, which is a very similar species except the fruit is covered in rubbery spikes and not smooth at all. Their fruits are useless. They contain a few large hard seeds and offer nothing for the dinner table.
The creeping cucumber is one of my favorite plants because it offers a great wild substitute for a commercially available food that we are all familiar with. The fruits give us a chance to enjoy modern food even if we didn't store away seed for disaster ahead of time.
The plants can be cultivated and grown in gardens to provide food year after year. To do this, you will need to save some seed. This is easy to accomplish by simply letting a few of the fruits ripen on the vine and let them reseed the area for next year.
So creeping cucumber is a plant to keep an eye out for, now and after the SHTF. You certainly don't have to wait for that to happen before you start growing and enjoying them on the dinner table.
