cucumbers

[baby_blue]

Hi have a cucumber plant growing outside on my lottie, it has flowers on them and a few flowers have little cucumbers starting to grow!! (never grown a cucumber before!)

i came home and checked in my 2 lottie books, one said to let them grow along the ground and the other said to grow them up stakes! so i'm now confused! no explanations in the books wee given, other than growing up canes will stop slugs!

at the mo, i have it growing up canes. any advice would be great!

sophie

[Thelma Sanders]

tie the plant to the canes as they grow. The little cukes mean that these are female flowers, the ones without littlies are the male flowers.
What variety are you growing? as some need the male flowers to be taken off.......most outside ones you can just leave to get on with it, but you need to check to be on the safeside

[taff]

making them grow up canes means the fuit isn't on the ground to rot or get eaten. I don't know if cucumbers put out extra roots on the ground, therefore get extra feed, like squashes do....

[gojiberry]

At one time the only cucumbers that stood any chance outside were called ridge cucumbers and were grown along the ground like squashes. With modern breeding there are now cucumbers that can be grown outside and up canes. Personally I find cucumbers grow better on the horizontal rather than the vertical, even in the greenhouse.

Ian

[SarahStrawberry]

Hi

It's my first year growing cucumbers and I trained 2 plants up canes really to save space in our polytunnel. They are Marketmore and they've done really well, i've had 6 fair sized cucumbers already and there's more coming now, about 2-3 inches long at the moment.