I scrapped a queen size box spring out of the trash, cut all the fabric off, then gave it a couple 2x4 legs. I plant the cucs in front of it then train them up it when they are about 3 weeks and then they do the rest by themselves. It works great. Just face it south and make sure it is sturdy. They grow up the springs great. Then it sits on the side of my garage all winter. Here is a link that might be useful: Pic of the box spring

I don't think I have any "secret" tips but I'll throw out a few tidbits about raising each crop. CUCUMBERS: I grow two kinds--slicers and picklers. I like to grow all of them either on a fence, a trellis or a cage because the cukes are easier to find that way. It is amazing how hard it can be to find a green cucumber in all those green leaves if you let the plants run along on the ground. Sometimes I plant a bush variety like Picklebush because bush pickles give maximum productivity in minimal space. You can even grow Picklebush in containers. I don't plant cucumber seeds until the soil temps are at least 60 degrees because they don't germinate well in cold soil. Adequate watering is essential or cucumber growth will stall, so I water well and mulch heavily. I like to pick cucumbers while they are smallish--esp. for pickling. And, be sure to keep the plants well-piecked. If you leave even one cucumber on the plant too long, the whole plant slows down and stops producing. If you only have room for one type, but you want to have both picklers and slicers, plant a picking type and harvest some for slicing too. However, using a slicer as a pickler doesn't usually work. If you want to grow an unusual type, Lemon Cucumber is a great heirloom type that is lemon-yellow at the picking stage, or orangey-yellow if you leave it on the vine too long. CANTALOUPE: Most of the melons we call "cantaloupe" in the USA are actually muskmelons. I grow all my melons (cantaloupe, muskmelon, and all the minor melons) the same way I grow cucumbers--vertically, usually inside tomato cages. You can put a lot more plants in your garden that way and the melons are less likely to rot or have insect damage if they are not lying on the ground. With heavier melons, I make a sling or support for them using either cheesecloth, or knee-high nylon hose. With melons, overwatering and overfeeding can dilute the flavor, so I take care not to overwater, especially once fruitset is occurring. If the plants are overwatered after melons have formed and are ripening, the flavor can be awful (as in, there is no flavor) and the texure will be poor. So, water 'em while the plants are growing and flowering, and then be really careful not to water too much. I don't feed mine at all--just improve the soil by adding organic matter every year and let the soil feed the plants. Often, people think their fruit is poorly flavored because their melons cross with cukes or other cucurbits, but that is not what happens--it is the overwatering/overfeeding. Melons perform best on loose, friable, sandy loam or silty loam although they perform well for me in highly improved clay, esp. in raised beds. I prefer the flavor of heirloom melons, but grow both heirlooms and hybrids in order to have a nice variety. If you are buying plants or seed, any of the Hale's, Hale's Best, Hale's Best Jumbo, etc. are great. For heirloom melons, you can buy seed of many. Some of my favorites are Collective Farm Woman, Canoe Creek Colossal, Piel de Sapo, Charentais, Eden's Gem, Pike (best performer in clay soil that I've ever seen), Nutmeg, Prescott Fond Blanc, Early Frame Prescott, and Golden Jenny. Honestly, though, I've never tasted an heirloom melon I didn't like. SQUASH: Lots of people overplant squash. I usually plant only 1 or 2 yellow crookneck plants and 1 or 2 zucchini plants at a time, although I will succession plant new plants later in the summer as the original plants play out. I tend to plant these at the edge of the corn bed because they are huge monsters and can get quite large. The key to good production is to check the plants daily and harvest promptly. Failure to do so can leave you with very large, tough crookneck or straightneck squash or very large, often watery zucchinis were poor texture. People who grow for "size" often don't get the best flavor. I usually plant squash only after the cold nights are over. Squash plants like a lot of water too, but are prone to foliar disease, so soaker hoses or drip lines or watering by hand at the ground level and keeping water off the foliage works best. Winter squash, including pumpkins, like really warm soil and I don't plant them until the soil temperature has been at least 70 degrees for three days in a row. Most winter squash and pumpkins take up a lot of space, so mine go on the edges of the corn bed where they can ramble and roam to their heart's content. There are a very limited number of bush types of winter squash and pumpkins, or mini-pumpkins, if you have space issues. These plants get foliar diseases like powdery mildew very easily, so I won't plant them until June if April and May are very rainy, and that often helps keep disease to a minimum. Squash bugs are a common pest. I try to keep these to a minimum by checking the backs of leaves for eggs and removing and destroying those eggs if found, and by hand-picking and drowning any squash bugs I see. Squash vine borers are your plants' number one enemy and covering the plants with floating row covers (and pollinating flowers by hand since pollinators cannot get inside the row covers) helps keep their damage to a minimum. JALAPENOS: Peppers are grown pretty much the same as tomatoes, to which they are related. I always start with transplants. If direct-seeded, peppers won't produce until late summer or fall. I set out my peppers about two to three weeks after tomatoes, or about the first couple of weeks in May since cool temperatures can permanently stunt them. Peppers set best when nightimes are above 60 degrees and daytimes are below 80, so May really is their perfect month for growing, flowering and setting fruit. If you are getting lots of blooms by the end of May or even in the first couple of weeks in June before the true summer heat arrives you'll have a great yield. Hot peppers set fruit better all summer long than sweet peppers, but both will set well in the fall. Pepper plants are brittle and break easily, so I either stake them to 2'-3' tall stakes, or use the small, cheap tomato cages you buy at the store, to support them. Even just a heavy load of ripening peppers can snap the plants in half, and support helps prevent that. Pepper fruits themselves get sunscald easily, so I often plant them where they get full sun from sunup until about 1 or 2 p.m., then shade until about 4 or 5 p.m., and then a little sun late in the day and they produce just fine, with less sunscald too. Sweet peppers are often harvested green, but I like to let them turn their mature color before I harvest--it takes a couple of weeks more, but the flavor is 1000% better. I usually grow sweet peppers that mature to red, orange, yellow, purple and chocolate. Peppers are water guzzlers and will sulk if you let them get too dry, so I like to water deeply and never let the peppers wilt. If they wilt, they do not bounce back as well as other plants do after wilting. By the way, hot weather seems to make peppers hotter, so the hotter your summer weather, the hotter and better your pepper flavor. WATERMELONS: These take up a lot of space. A whole lot. So, I tend to go with smaller space saver types. The best melon I've ever grown and eaten are Blacktail Mountain, bred by Glenn Drowns, who owns Sandhill Preservation Center. The seed is available from Sandhill and from other sources too like Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek. They are small melons with dark red flesh and dark green rinds and superb flavor. Other small bush-type melons that I grow in my garden include Sugar Baby, Bush Sugar Baby and Yellow Doll. Like cantaloupe and muskmelons, too much water ruins the flavor and too much fertilizer, especially nitrogen, causes white heart--which is white spots with no flavor in the middle of the melon. So, avoid chemical fertilizers and don't overwater. Melons put out their vegetative growth first but you ought to see flowers appearing about 8 to 10 weeks after the plants are transplanted, or after the seeds sprout. If you use transplants instead of seeds, and you set them out at the right time (soil temps should be at least 70 degrees), you'll get blooms and melons about 2 weeks earlier from transplants than from direct-seeding. PEAS: I don't know if you mean cool-season peas like green peas, sugar snap peas or snow peas, or if you mean southern peas like black-eyed peas, crowder peas or cream peas, so let me know which ones you're growing. OKRA: Okra is one of the true heat lovers and goes best if planted fairly late. Okra sprouts quickly if direct-seeded in warm (75-90 degree) soil. Generally one planting is all you need (unless deer get into the garden and eat your plants down to the ground) and the plants produce all summer long. Keep the okra picked or production shuts down. I pick when the pods they are 3", 4" or maybe 5" long. If you let them get longer, they'll be very tough. Once okra is producing, I pick every day or every other day. It only takes about 4 to 7 days for okra to go from the flower stage to being ready-to-pick. I think okra is a gorgeous plant and like to plant it in my mixed border along with flowers and herbs--especially when planting the ones with red pods. If space is an issue (the plants can get 6' to 8' to 10' tall), you can grow the dwarf ones like "Baby Bubba" or "Little Lucy". Both look wonderful in flower beds or pots as well as in the veggie garden. In deer country, it is almost impossible to grow okra unless it is protected by a fence. Dawn

After perusing the suggestions here and doing lots of web surfing I've pretty much discarded my initial hunches. Now I think one of the keys is the leavening agent. Evidently, hartshorn was the traditional leavening agent, as Carol says. Most people today probably use baking powder, as called for by many recipes. But there are at least two types of baking powder. I have reason to believe my grandmother used Davis double acting, which I believe has a heat activated compound as well as a water activated one. I don't think she used hartshorn, although that is possible. I need to ask my mother if she knows. My daughter has both Davis and Rumford in her kitchen and doesn't recall which one was used in previous years' springerle. Rumford is also labeled as double acting, but is faster acting and may be exhausted during the overnight drying period called for by most springerle recipes. The purpose of drying is to retain the sharpness of the embossed designs during baking. Rumford says this about their product: "As an all-phosphate baking powder, Rumford Baking Powder does not contain any aluminum. This property makes it somewhat faster acting than typical double-acting baking powders. Youâll still see a boost of leavening in the oven, but most of the reaction occurs in the mixing bowl. While this makes a more delicate crumb structure in the finished product, do not dawdle. Youâve got to work quickly for best results." Well, an overnight drying period is some serious dawdling. I'm thinking that Rumford baking powder is not a good choice for springerle. I think springerle needs either hartshorn or a baking powder which includes calcium aluminium phosphate. Of course, there are other factors such as proportion of ingredients, amount of mixing, baking time and baking temperature which must be considered too. Drying time doesn't seem to be critical. Lengthy beating of the eggs and sugar, as mentioned by Grainlady, is sometimes emphasized. I don't know the reason for that, incorporating air I guess. My daughter's results improved when she switched to a recipe using cake flour. If I understand it correctly, that would jibe with the cautions against developing gluten. But it is unusual for a springerle recipe to call for cake flour. In my OP, I failed to mention a feature of my grandmother's springerle because I didn't know how to describe it. In a couple of sites I found, there is a discussion of springerle having a "foot". This is an oval base on the bottom of the cookie which raises it slightly off the baking sheet. That feature is familiar to me. I don't know if that is what happened to bcskye's springerle which "kind of puffed out of the bottom". Maybe so. That's my progress report for know. I'll let you know of any further developments. In the mean time, take a look at some of the sites featuring springerle on the internet (the one linked below has some nice photos) and tell me what your experience has been with different brands of baking powder.

I have a "deck" garden. I planted all my veggies and herbs in pots, and now there taking up the whole deck. One of my favorite plants on my deck is my cucumber plants. I have two of them, (there the slicing breed) and there in a long (two feet) green planter. My cucumber plants spread all over the deck, which is kind of awesome. That means I get many more cucumbers. cucumbers grow so fast, so you will be harvesting cucumbers before you know it. Some kinds of cucumbers, like mine, reproduce. I harvested about eight cucumbers from one plant and five from the other, and about a week after I harvested the last one (I thought It was the last one) I saw five female flowers with mini cucumbers. I haven't harvested any of the second batch yet, but they will be ready to harvest in a couple of days. Plant your cucumber plants in mid May to late May for best results. Plant them when the ground is at least 70 degrees, at least two weeks after the last first date. Water them once a day, unless it needs more or less. Do not water the leaves, as the leaves can get diseases if you do. You can use a trellis so the cucumbers can clime up the trellis. You get straighter fruit this way and sometimes you get bigger vines. Don't use trellises for bush varieties, bush cucumbers are best for raised beds and not planters. Burpless means that they have thin skin andd are easy to digest. I love cucumbers because you can use them in cooking, or just eat it by itself. Either way, garden fresh cucumbers are the way to go.