New York Today: Cucumber Time

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times A brown cucumber at the city’s biggest community garden! Sounds like news to us.

In the Netherlands, journalists speak of a stretch of summer they call Cucumber Time, when newsmakers are out of town and the papers put silly stories on the front page.

Similar phrases exist in Danish, Czech, Slovene, Hebrew and Icelandic, though we unimaginative American journalists refer to the period as “slow news season.”

This summer in New York, what with two fierce political races and the city’s policing tactics under scrutiny, there has been relatively little cucumber time.

Nevertheless, there is cucumber news.

In the city’s biggest community garden, at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, the cukes are ripening on the vine.

Not just dark-skinned green ones and bumpy Kirbys, but yellow cucumbers, spherical ones the size of golf balls and even, in the plot of the garden president, Adriann Musson, wrong-looking brown-skinned cucumbers of Indian origin.

Ms. Musson offered a persuasive argument for the relevance of the cucumber.

“Cucumbers are nutritious,” she said. “They refresh tired eyes. They’re easy to grow, they make great pickles â€" and New Yorkers love their pickles.”

There is even some controversy in cucumberland. The National Park Service, landlord of the 7.43-acre garden, wants to begin charging for water and land use, Ms. Musson said.

“Cucumbers take a lot of water,” she said. “If we have to pay a water bill and I have to limit how much water people use, what’s going to happen to our vegetables?”

Here’s what you need to know for your Monday.

WEATHER
Greyish in the morning, and there will be a small chance of afternoon showers or even a thunderstorm, though the temperature will top out only around 80.

TRANSIT & TRAFFIC

- Mass Transit: Click for latest M.T.A. status.

- Metro-North schedules are changing today because of track work in The Bronx.

- Roads: Traffic is doing well. Click for traffic map or radio report on the 1s.

Alternate-side parking is in effect.

COMING UP TODAY

- Novak Djokovic, the top tennis player in the world, greets fans at the Uniqlo on 5th Avenue at 6 p.m. [Free]

- Hopefully the sun will come out today, not tomorrow, because “Annie” is screening in Astoria Park at 8:30 p.m. [Free]

- Bryant Park’s last movie of the season: “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.” Start saving a seat at 5 p.m. [Free]

- Los Muros Hablan, a weeklong international urban art festival in Harlem, starts today. Too much to list here: Click for info. [ Free]

- Laugh along with the Brooklyn Comedy Festival at Spike Hill, 186 Bedford Avenue. Doors open at 7:30. [Free]

- The Red Hook Film Fest is now accepting Hurricane Sandy-themed entries.

- Learn about cartooning in a lecture class, part of a series dubbed the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium. 7:00 PM at 2 West 13th Street. [Free]

IN THE NEWS

- A deal has been reached to retool the city’s restaurant grading system, including lessening some fines. [Staten Island Advance]

- The mother of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot and killed by a man volunteering for neighborhood patrol, spoke out on television against the New York’s stop and frisk police tactic. [NBC]

- Someone left their alligator in a Westchester County pond. [CBS]

- The Daily News, The New York Post and the editorial board of The New York Times all endorsed Scott M. Stringer as the democratic candidate for comptroller over his opponent Eliot Spitzer. [New York Times]

- A 26-year-old rookie cop shot himself in the leg when re-holstering his gun during a call to a Bedford-Stuyvesant block party. [New York Daily News]

- The damage from a vehicle fire that partially melted a beam of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge over the weekend has been mostly repaired. [NY1]

AND FINALLY…

The 19th Amendment, which permitted women to vote in the United States, had its 93rd birthday over the weekend.

And (as with all good things, we think) New York City played a role.

The National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in New York City in 1869.

The group split with other suffragist associations on several issues, including how to make suffrage happen. While some wanted to work on changing voting rules state-by-state, the New York-based association strove for something considered more radical at the time â€" nothing less than an amendment to the nation’s constitution.

Only over five decades later would their dream be realized.

Nicole Higgins DeSmet contributed reporting.

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