What’s going on, gardeners? So that’s why in today’s article, I’m going to show you five different tips for growing cucumbers that your cucumber plants will absolutely love you for.
Tip #1: When To Transplant Cucumbers
The first tip I’m going to give you is not to rush your cucumber transplants out into your garden. Now, if you’re like me and your foundational crops in your garden are tomatoes and peppers, you are used to planting your tomatoes and peppers out after your last chance of frost, and that is fine for tomatoes and peppers because they can tolerate the early spring temperatures after frost has passed where it still dips down into the low 40s and upper 30s. That is not a big deal for your tomatoes and peppers as long as the temperatures bounce back up and warm up during the day. They will recover just fine. However, that is not the case for your cucumber plants. Your cucumber plants are in the cucurbit family, they are much more sensitive to cool temperatures than your nightshade. Your tomatoes, and your peppers, and your potatoes, and your eggplant. Your cucumbers should not be planted until several weeks, maybe even a full month after your last frost date. You don’t want to plant out your cucumbers until your nighttime temperatures are always consistently at least 50 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. They do not do well when nights dip down into the 40s or the 30s like your tomatoes and pepper plants will. When it comes to growing tomatoes, it takes on average about 120 days from the day you plant that tomato seed in the ground for it to grow up into a plant and have its first ripe fruit. Your cucumber plants will be ready about 50 to 60 days on average after you plant that seed into the ground or into your transplant trays. So they will produce in roughly half the time as a tomato. Even if you plant your cucumber plants about a month after your tomatoes, you will still be harvesting cucumbers off your cucumber plants before the overwhelming majority of your tomatoes. In fact, I have already harvested two-foot-long cucumbers off of this China jade plant right here.
Tip #2: Mulching Cucumbers
The subsequent cucumber developing tip that your plants will cherish you for is to continuously ensure that you have a few inch layer of mulch around the foundation of your cucumber plants consistently. Furthermore, that is on the grounds that while cucumbers are exceptionally delicate to cold temperatures, they’re additionally extremely delicate to warm pressure. Cucumbers are a great deal like us. They are fair-weather conditions establishes that believe consistently should be 80 degrees and consistently to be 65 degrees. What’s more, incidentally, assuming you know where that spot is throughout the entire year, that is additionally really modest to reside. You make a point to tell me since I’m a fair-weather conditions plant myself.. What’s more, I like this since it not just secures in the dirt dampness and keeps the roots quite cool and uniformly soggy, which is basic to forestall heat pressure in your plants, yet as it separates, it will likewise add a ton of natural make a difference to the dirt. In any case, if you would rather not use hardwood bark mulch, you can utilize any sort of all-normal mulch. It doesn’t make any difference. You can utilize cedar mulch, cypress mulch, pine bark pieces, straw, grass clippings, anything that is certainly not a colored mulch since that is generally frightful ground-up beds and garbage wood that you wouldn’t need in your nursery. And furthermore, don’t utilize different things like engineered elastic mulches and such. Simply ensure it is a characteristic mulch. Furthermore, what this mulch will do is it will forestall heat pressure in your plants by keeping the high degree of soil safeguarded from the UV beams of the sun so your underlying foundations will remain overall quite cool and it will likewise keep up with even dampness in the dirt by forestalling vanishing, keeping those roots equitably clammy and safeguarding your dirt while additionally adding natural matter into your dirt. It’s simply awesome.
Tip #3: Growing Cucumbers Vertically
Third tip for growing cucumbers that your plants will love you for is to get them up off the ground and grow them vertically. Cucumbers are highly susceptible to pests and disease. Getting them in the air, growing vertically will not only provide more airflow and lessen disease, but you’ll also get those fruits up off the ground because pests that crawl along the soil love to eat those cucumbers. So if you can get those fruits up off the ground, they will be less likely to be damaged by pests as well. Now, my favorite way of growing cucumbers vertically is this string trellis method, which I have showed you how to do many times in the past. And I grow my tomatoes predominantly in this method. All you need for this is something overhead like a cable or some kind of PVC pipe or a piece of wood and then one of these double tomato hooks and tomato clips. All you do is you take this synthetic nylon string that comes pre-installed on the double tomato hook, and you attach one of these tomato clips to the plant. And then from there, you can choose to either wrap the string around the vines of the plant or you can use more of these clips to clip it to the vine. However, there are many more ways that you can do this. You can grow them up along a fence, you can grow them up along cattle panel, you can build a fun little tepee structure like I built right here, and the cucumbers will naturally climb up that structure. They are a climbing vine, so as long as you give them something to grab onto, they will climb up whatever you choose to use as your trellis. Feel free to be creative. Just get them up off the ground so they will be less susceptible to diseases and pests.
Tip #4: Growing Parthenocarpic Cucumbers
The fourth cucumber creating tip that I will give you is to create parthenocarpic cucumber arrangements. As of now, what’s the importance here? In light of everything, there are three particular sorts of fruiting plants in nature. There are self-opposite plants like pawpaw trees, where you truly need to have two innately original plants where the male residue should be passed from the bloom on one plant on to the female bits of the blossom of the other genetically surprising plant, and those two genetically outstanding plants ought to cross-treat to pollinize the results of the dirt it set.There are self-rich plants, and that implies one individual plant can fertilize itself. Presently, it can have the male and female parts encased in a solitary blossom, and everything that must be done is the breeze needs to stir it up to shake the male dust all around the female parts, or it could have separate male and female blossoms, and something like a honey bee should go from the male bloom to the female blossom. That is the manner by which cucumbers, as a rule. What’s more, the third choice is to have a parthenocarpic organic product. With parthenocarpic organic products, the blossoms don’t require fertilization by any means to set natural products. They can set natural products in sterility without fertilization. Presently, by far most of cucumber assortments out there are self-ripe. In any case, the male blossoms and the female blossoms are unique. Here you see a female bloom on a cucumber, and you know it’s a female blossom on the grounds that the bloom here has a child cucumber connected to it. That implies that it is a female blossom. Presently, this rose down here, it has no child cucumber connected. This is a male flower, and the pollen is kept inside this flower. So in order for this plant to pollinate successfully, a bee has to visit this flower and transfer enough pollen into this flower in order to fertilize the cucumber, and then this cucumber right here will turn into a baby fruit, and it will eventually mature into a full-sized cucumber. If a bee does not visit this plant and we do not get pollen transfer, or if the bee does not transfer enough pollen, this cucumber right here will shrivel up and abort and fall off. This right here is a zucchini plant, and zucchinis are in the exact same cucurbit family as cucumbers, so they have the same pollination requirements. And right here, the reason why this zucchini is shrivelling up is because it was not pollinated. In order for this to have been pollinated, I would have needed this male flower right here. Pollen transfer would have had to have happened into this fruit blossom, which has since aborted. So in order for that to happen, the plant has to pollinate itself, using predominantly bees. But the reason why I had to show you what it looked like when a fruit aborts itself due to a lack of pollination on my zucchini plant is because I’m growing a parthenocarpic variety of cucumber right here. This variety is called Bite Alpha. It is an incredible cucumber, very disease-resistant, burpless, extremely crisp, and it sets fruit without pollination. One of the biggest problems people have with good cucumber production is they lose a lot of fruits to lack of pollination. They just don’t get enough bees in their garden, so they wind up having a lot of different fruits fail. And this variety is so amazing because the fruits will hold and grow to maturity even if a bee does not visit and pollinate them. In fact, if the bee doesn’t visit and they don’t get cross-pollinated by another variety, and no male pollen makes it into the femaleflower, they will grow completely seed-free, seedless fruits. And this variety right here, Bite Alpha, is incredibly popular for growing in greenhouses because it does not require pollination at all. Because I love diversity in my garden and eating different varieties of food, I made sure to go out and get a completely different parthenocarpic variety. This variety right here is called China Jade. I’ve been growing it for two years. It is my second favorite cucumber. And this variety right here makes enormous, one-yard-long fruits. I’ve already harvested two giant cucumbers off of this plant. They fruit so quickly despite their size. These are also parthenocarpic. They set fruit without pollination, and the two that I harvested were completely seedless and delicious. Now, if you want to make sure that your fruits have the best chances of being seedless, you’ll want to plant them far away from each other if you’re growing different varieties because if they cross-pollinate with the male flowers, you will get seeds. The fruit will be perfectly fine and delicious and edible, but they will have seeds. So I have my China Jade growing over here, and then I have my two Bite Alphas growing on the complete opposite side of the garden, about 45 feet away. And that is far enough, generally speaking, that the bees won’t go directly from plant to plant, so they very rarely cross-pollinate. Now, if you grow a parthenocarpic variety, will all the fruit hold? No. You still will get some fruit losses, and they’re especially susceptible to temperatures because that’s just how cucumbers are. So you will lose some of them. Nothing in nature is 100%. However, you will get more fruit off of these parthenocarpic varieties than you will growing the standard meniscus varieties where every single individual cucumber will have to be pollinated. So I truly think that I get double, if not triple, the yields off of this variety than all of the others. As you can see, I’m getting cucumbers all over this plant, and it still has a long way to go. There’s more cucumbers down here. Here’s one, two, three. Just great production. And I’m growing four plants total. I’m growing these two here as well as the two that I just showed you growing up my garden tepee. They do extremely well in my hot, humid conditions.
Tip #5: Succession Planting Cucumbers
The fifth tip that I’m going to give you for growing cucumbers that your plants will love you for is to succession plant them. And what succession planting means is that you periodically plant out new plants into the garden. Now, remember when I told you earlier that cucumber plants will fruit in roughly half the time of a tomato plant from the day that you plant that seed into the ground or your seed trays? Well, cucumber plants mature very quickly, but they also live fast and they die hard. Your cucumber plants have a very short lifespan, as do most other cucurbits like your zucchini and many of the squashes. So you’re not going to be able, in most cases, to maintain those plants throughout the entire summer like you would be able to, say, a tomato plant, an indeterminate tomato plant that will produce all the way until frost. In fact, I would caution you against that because cucumber plants usually get beat up so much and they tire out so quickly that they become weak and they become a magnet for pests and diseases. So by trying to keep them in your garden too long, you will actually bring more pests and diseases into your garden by providing them weak plants to attack. Therefore, I recommend that every roughly six to eight weeks, you start new cucumber plants and new zucchini plants. And that’s what I’m doing right now. I have two new Bite Alphas, two new China Jades, and two zucchini plants that I’m starting inside this six-cell tray right here. And here, I also have some more sunflowers that I’m planting as well because I succession plant them as well so I always have sunflowers in full bloom as trap crops, which is another link that I’ll link to above for your benefit and also for the beauty and for the pollinators in my garden. So there’s beautiful cucumber plants that I was just showing you that were just starting to produce and looking pretty good and still young and healthy. I’m telling you, in four to six weeks, they’re going to be beat up, they’re going to have disease, and they’re going to start tiring out. . So consistently try to have new transfers in your nursery. Likewise worth focusing on new plants will be undeniably more sick and bug safe. So by keeping the new ones prevalently in your nursery, they will be less defenceless against bugs and illness.
Everybody, I sure hope you found this article helpful.
Tip #5: Succession Planting Cucumbers
The fifth tip that I’m going to give you for growing cucumbers that your plants will love you for is to succession plant them. And what succession planting means is that you periodically plant out new plants into the garden. Now, remember when I told you earlier that cucumber plants will fruit in roughly half the time of a tomato plant from the day that you plant that seed into the ground or your seed trays? Well, cucumber plants mature very quickly, but they also live fast and they die hard. Your cucumber plants have a very short lifespan, as do most other cucurbits like your zucchini and many of the squashes. So you’re not going to be able, in most cases, to maintain those plants throughout the entire summer like you would be able to, say, a tomato plant, an indeterminate tomato plant that will produce all the way until frost. In fact, I would caution you against that because cucumber plants usually get beat up so much and they tire out so quickly that they become weak and they become a magnet for pests and diseases. So by trying to keep them in your garden too long, you will actually bring more pests and diseases into your garden by providing them weak plants to attack. Therefore, I recommend that every roughly six to eight weeks, you start new cucumber plants and new zucchini plants. And that’s what I’m doing right now. I have two new Bite Alphas, two new China Jades, and two zucchini plants that I’m starting inside this six-cell tray right here. And here, I also have some more sunflowers that I’m planting as well because I succession plant them as well so I always have sunflowers in full bloom as trap crops, which is another link that I’ll link to above for your benefit and also for the beauty and for the pollinators in my garden. So there’s beautiful cucumber plants that I was just showing you that were just starting to produce and looking pretty good and still young and healthy. I’m telling you, in four to six weeks, they’re going to be beat up, they’re going to have disease, and they’re going to start tiring out. . So consistently try to have new transfers in your nursery. Likewise worth focusing on new plants will be undeniably more sick and bug safe. So by keeping the new ones prevalently in your nursery, they will be less defenceless against bugs and illness.
Everybody, I sure hope you found this article helpful.
