Just one or two cucumber trellises will yield a nice harvest and make the most of garden space.
Set cucumber transplants at the base of your trellis and mulch after planting unless the soil could use a little more warming.
Cucumbers on a trellis are clean and easy to pick. Use a trellis small enough for tendrils to grab.
Cucumbers bear male and female flowers. Female blooms have a small swelling at the base, the makings of a fruit. See the old flower withering at the end of the baby fruit.
To harvest cucumbers, cut (don't pull) them from the vine. Pulling or yanking can damage the brittle vines.
Cucumbers running over bare ground will be dirty.A tropical vegetable, cucumbers thrive when the weather is hot and water is plentiful. Plants are so frost-tender that they shouldn’t be set into the garden until soil temperatures are reliably in the 70-degree-range (about two weeks after the last frost date).
Cucumber plants grow in two forms: vining and bush. Vines scramble along the ground or clamber up trellises, while bush types, such as Burpless Bush Hybrid, form a compact mound. Generally, vining cucumbers yield more fruit throughout the growing season. Bush selections are especially suited to containers and small gardens. You can increase the season’s yield of bush varieties by planting several crops in succession one to two weeks apart.
Whether you want a cucumber for slicing or pickling, there’s a variety to suit your taste. Lemon cucumber offers smaller fruits perfect for a single serving, while Boston Pickling boasts classic heirloom taste.
Soil, Planting, and Care
Cucumbers need warm, fertile soil with a pH 6.0 to 6.8, although they will tolerate a bit more alkaline soil to 7.6. Work compost or composted manure into soil.
If you want to grow cucumbers in rows on the ground, create hills like you do for squash spaced 4 feet apart. Space two to three transplants per hill, setting seedlings 6 inches apart. For vines trained on a trellis, space plants 1 foot apart. In areas where spring is long and cool, you can warm the soil 3 to 4 degrees by covering the hill or row with black plastic.
If you do not plant in black plastic, then mulch with pine straw, wheat straw, chopped leaves or your favorite organic mulch shortly after planting. If the weather is unseasonably cool, you can wait a while to mulch until the ground warmed by the sun. Mulch is especially important for bush types and vines not growing on a trellis to keep the fruit clean. Straw mulch is also thought to be uncomfortable to slugs and create an uneasy footing for cucumber beetles, helping to keep them at bay.
If you can, trellis your vines. This keeps the fruit clean and saves space. A 12 to 18-inch diameter cage made from 4 or 5-foot welded wire fencing or hog wire will support two or three vines. Wire is easy for the tentrils of climbing cucumbers to grab as the plant grows.
Cucumbers grow fast and don’t demand a lot of care. Just keep the soil consistently moist with an inch of water per week—more if temperatures sizzle and rain is scarce. Inadequate or inconsistent moisture causes oddly shaped or poor-tasting fruit. If possible water your cucumbers with a soaker hose or drip irrigation to help keep the foliage dry. This helps prevent leaf diseases that can ruin the plant.
You can fertilize with a liquid food every two weeks applying it directly to soil around plant stems. Or you can use a granular, slow-release fertilizer worked into the soil when you plant, or sprinkled around the plants later.
Troubleshooting
If vines bloom but don’t fruit, something is probably interfering with pollination. First, make sure that you see both male and female blooms. Male blooms usually appear first and then drop off, so don't be alarmed if this happens when the plant begins to bloom. Nothing is wrong. Within a week or two, female flowers will also appear; they have a small cucumber shape swelling at the base that will become a cucumber; male blooms don’t and they fall off after a day. Cold weather, rain, and insecticides that kill bees can hamper pollination. You can’t change the weather, but do avoid spraying or dusting a pesticide toxic bees; this is always stated on the product label. Also consider planting bee balm, zinnias, lantana, and other flowers that attract bees to the edges of your garden. A row of these for cutting is always a great way to flowers for cutting.
Several pests bother cucumbers. Squash bugs may attack seedlings. Slugs like ripening fruit. Aphids can colonize leaves and buds. Straw mulch helps keep slugs at bay, as can trellising vines to get the fruit off the ground. Vines are also bothered by cucumber beetles, which chew holes in leaves and flowers and scar stems and fruits, but worse than that they spread a disease that causes the plants to wilt and die. Read more about all of these pests and their control in our problem solving section.
Powdery mildew is a disease that a white, mildew like patches on the leaves. Apply fungicides at the first sign of its presence. To minimize disease spread, avoid harvesting or handling vines when leaves are wet.
Harvest and Storage
You can pick cucumbers whenever they’re big enough to use. Check vines daily as the fruit starts to appear because they enlarge quickly. Vines produce more fruit the more you harvest. To remove the fruit, use a knife or clippers, cutting the stem above the fruit. If you try to pull them, it may damage the vine.
Don’t let the cucumbers get oversized or they will be bitter and will also keep the vine from producing more. Overripe fruit has hard seeds that are difficult to chew. Yellowing at the bottom (blossom end) of a cucumber signals overripe, bitter fruit. Never leave overripe fruit on the vine just because it is too far gone. Remove it.
You can keep harvested cucumbers in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 days, using as soon as possible after picking. If you don’t eat a slicing cucumber all at once, cover the unused portion in plastic wrap to prevent dehydration in the refrigerator.