Cucumber Dilemma!!

[Trick]

Hi All,
I've got two very happy cucumber plants in my greenhouse, flowering lots and producing lots of fruit. But (I know, there's always a but!!) as the fruit gets larger they lose their green colour and end up yellow. Everything else about the plants are fine so its really annoying. Any ideas??

[sewer rat]

Your yellow cukes are running to seed. When this happens, the fruits start to turn yellow and within days are soft, yellow and quite manky.
You need to remove these immediately, ot the plant will think it has reproduced and stop producing more cukes for you.
The cukes should still be edible if you catch them just as the point where they connect to the main stem is starting to yellow. You don't say what variety you are growing but cukes do all tend to hit you at once and really do need to be watched over closely. I have sixty F1 All female plants (Femspot and Topsy) and have harvested approx 330 cukes so far but just last week they started getting away from me and I consigned 30 odd to the compost heap as they were too yellow to be any use - not even for pickling or soup.

[thatsshallot]

hi new to forum ,got problems with cuc only getting inch long then turning yellow from flower in towards stem ,do ya think could be same problem ?

[sewer rat]

could be that there is another problem affecting your cukes as running to seed usually omnly affects mature fruits, though it's possible that if one has run to seed then others may follow regardless of maturity.
However, I would suggest that there may be something amiss with the plant's health. Is it watered enoug -or too much ? Have you fed it with anything ? Are the leaves still healthy - check for CMV (Cucumber Mosaic Virus), Red Spider Mite etc.
Let us know if anything comes to mind.

[thatsshallot]

hi all plants are f1 all female plants [3 ] leaves seem pale and translucent spots on them think waterings ok , just fed em tomato food once every two weeks , might try marketmore76 next year ,have ya grown these before .

[sewer rat]

Not grown Marketmore before, so can't help you on that one. Is it possible to take a photo of the plants and close up of the leaves, so that we can get a better idea of any potential problem.
I am growing Pepeinex 69 and Femspot - both F1 all female varieties and have a huge crop. Having said that I now have red spider mite (biological control should arrive tomorrow) and also my plants look as if they are suffering from all manner of diseases and viruses but the cukes are still coming fast on the whole plant so I'm not too worried.
Bob Flowerdew has stated that if the plant is essentially healthy, it can look really poorly but still produce good crops - I've seen tomato plants that appeared all but dead still producing truss after truss of fruit.

[Kristen]

I always find that the Toms, Cues and other crops in my greenhouse look knackered by about this time in the year, but they seem to crop OK. I have stopped worrying about how the plants look, other than monitoring for serious diseases.