It’s not every day that bags filled with free vegetables are up for grabs to the community.

But this summer, some traveling through Cuba City came across a paper posted on a table advertising free cucumbers for the taking and happily accepted the unexpected gift.

Local Ariel Ebersviller, 32, her three kids, and her husband Dallas were the growers behind the bounty of produce.

They realized they had a large surplus of the crop one day this summer after harvesting around 30 pounds of cucumbers in a single sitting, said Ebersviller. They faced a decision.

The family of five, including three kids – ages 5, 9, and 11 – knew they weren’t going to be able to eat them all. Even giving them away to friends and extended family wasn’t going to get through the pile of them quickly enough.

So the family of gardening enthusiasts came up with the idea to put them out on the curb for the neighborhood to enjoy, said Ebersviller.

That did the trick.

Shortly after, the cucumbers were gone to be put to use across the neighborhood, she added.

Ebersviller heard back later from one local who thanked her for the delectable vegetables and told her she made soup with them that turned out great. Of course, Ebersviller sent her home with more to restock her fridge. 

Ebersviller enjoyed giving back in this way and hopes to continue and expand on this new custom of produce-giving in the seasons to come, she said.

This summer was the first time they have had so much produce to spread around, after doing a big project to create raised garden beds in their backyard from what was formerly just a patch of land. 

They made nine of them from cinder blocks and two more from a homemade, renovated former kitchen table.

Each of the Ebersviller couple’s three children got their own garden areas to select plants for, and they made some unique choices.

The youngest chose catnip and strawberries, and the oldest opted for peppers and flowers. A patch of corn, flowers and carrots rounded out the third of the kids’ planted plots.

They assisted some with day-to-day tasks like pulling out weeds from the beds, but “mostly they just like eating it all,” Ebersviller chuckled. 

One of Ebersviller’s favorite parts about gardening is finding produce to grow that a typical grocery store probably wouldn’t carry. It’s more fun that way, and it gives the kids a chance to try new things that they otherwise may not have the opportunity to, she said.

So far, she’s grown everything from purple tomatoes to ground cherries and cucamelons – which look like tiny, grape-sized watermelons, but taste like cucumbers, she said.

“I just really like the ‘not what you’d expect,’” plantings, she said. 

Of the abundant cucumber varieties she grew this year, her favorites were the lemon cucumbers. 

“My daughter was picking those off the vine and eating them like apples,” they were so good, she said, commenting that they look like rounded lemons and taste like a less bitter version of cucumbers, with a seemingly-longer shelf life. 

She also grew Armenian Yard Long Cucumbers – which are technically a melon, but taste like a cucumber and can span an actual yard in length, per their namesake, she added.

When Ebersviller was a kid, her grandpa always had a garden, she said. “I would always go out there, and I would eat the tomatoes like they were apples … I just loved that, and I wanted my kids to have that too.”

Keeping the tradition going, Ebersviller is already planning for the upcoming season’s crops of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers and more – particularly the unusual varieties. 

So next year, if you see a sign up across from the dentist’s office in Cuba City for free produce unlike anything you’ve never seen before, it may be Ebersviller and her family’s gardening efforts that went into cultivating the treat.