This Year's Cucumbers

For the love of Cucumbers!

Earlier this year I came across a new variety called Quick Snack F1 in a Suttons £1 sale - a cucumber plant that only grows to 50/60cm tall and produces 5-6cm fruit - this is one I could grow on a windowsill, coddle in bubblewrap or hide under a cloche in the poly tunnel.

For several seasons a long while back I used to start cucumbers early. But today (March 28th) for the first time in a while, I jumped back on the bandwagon and sowed my first cucumbers early. 2 Seeds in 3 inch pots, and popped them both in an ancient electric propagator perched on my box of legume seeds to accompany several trays of Coleus to germinate.

I don’t start Cucumbers early any more because I don’t have a sunny conservatory to keep them warm - and by the time cukes would have grown large, the grow room would be full of Courgette and Winter Squash starts and hundreds of large Tomatoes, Aubergines and Peppers.

Originally, early start cucumbers came about because I started growing under lights, and I remember years ago Bob Flowerdew on Gardener’s Question Time gaining quite a lot of notoriety for starting Cucumbers in January and eating them by Easter. Now of course Steve Richards and Jessie @ plot 37 both promote early starts on their channels.

I don’t know what the price of cukes will be in the stores this year, but for something that’s 97% water, it will of course be overpriced … So we should all find a variety to grow ourselves that’ll reduce demand and bring the price down for everyone :)

People say that cucumbers have lots of magical health benefits due to the phyto-nutrients, but the one everyone appreciates is the weight loss potential - Spas excel in pushing the benefits of cucumber water with mint or ginger as a hydration solution that apparently now beats out the healthy alternative of straight water with ice.

I’ve never liked the taste of cucumbers *huge gasp* but everyone around me does and I do love growing them *sigh of relief*.

As a brief aside I have been forced to eat cucumbers on several occasions around the world, but just one anecdote will do. The first time I ever left home it was to go to North Africa and the first time I ever travelled anywhere alone was North Africa. And the first time I ever had to eat a raw cucumber was North Africa.

During a particularly hot desert highway journey a fellow passenger bought a cucumber from an arm thrust through the window in the hope of a sale at a pitstop and handed it to me half wrapped in newspaper to quench my thirst - in those days there were few common languages and smiles and laughter were the currency of exchange and avoiding giving offence was all you needed to do to see the world at a human pace.

You never had to worry about being drugged, you never put ice in a drink, never ate unwashed food, peeled fruit, never touched a salad or ate fish if you didn’t see it come straight from the sea - and I hadn’t ever eaten more than a nibble of a cucumber since childhood as the bitter taste of cucurbitacins hadn’t been bred out - so this moment of genuine kindness hit all the fear spots and to top that, it was oozing gelatinous seeds, gritted with salt and sprinkled with cayenne pepper, and after two polite bites and gestures of many thanks I had to hide it in my pocket and dispose of it later.

My experiences with cucumbers are less traumatic these days, if they're pickled, I love them. If they’re cooked in an Indonesian style with ketjap manis or slathered in other flavour masking salad ingredients, I don’t gag.

I love the variety of Cucumbers. From the spikey peelers to the yard long Armenian to the all-female greenhouse parthenocarpic to the mini-munchers and gherkins - but I don’t grow any ridge cukes because all mine are grown up strings and under plastic.

🥒 “pick ‘em young, tire ‘em out and rip ‘em out.” 🥒

I’m very ruthless with these plants and I daresay somewhat abusive as I successionally sow plants throughout our season which tend to crop between the end of May to October in southern England.

I have between 12 and 16 stations assigned to cucumbers and as each one tires, or a leaf develops mosaic virus or later mildew I just whip them out, amend the soil and put another in - and this keeps a steady flow of produce, some unavoidable gluts and the occasional gap of a few days - but essentially I try to average a harvest of 2 cucumbers a day and iron out any production kinks in the crisper drawer.

The most awful side of growing cucumbers and being a recovering seedaholic is the price of cucumber seeds. With a significant proportion now being all female F1’s and costing £1 per seed and up, few people try more than one variety a year - But the shelf life of these could potentially reach 10 years so there’s no real problem collecting new or unusual varieties to try in every pound sale *gulp* - I have around 40 packets of cucumbers and only four are heirloom varieties and all of them have been bought in pound sales, at ag shows or end of season garden centre sell-offs and virtually none cost me more than £1 per packet.

As you can see in the photo above the vast majority are from all the usual suspects and high-priced seed suppliers in the UK.

If there is a history of cucumbers it’s not really the 3000 years it took to get from India to Greece, it’s the recent evolution of the homegrown cucumber compared to the store bought varieties. When the burpless varieties appeared we got the likes of Beit Alpha. Then varieties like La Diva F1 which is now superseded by Suprina F1 were sold as prolific and now many of the new varieties all seem to be aimed at a ‘lunchbox’ market.

A list of current favourites, past successes and an occasional first time variety are as follows:

Notable heirloom varieties are Crystal Lemon and Marketmore76 and Telegraph but I no longer grow them. A new heirloom sent to me by a Ukranian seed company that I’ll be growing this year is simply called “Ukranian”.

The best long cucumbers that I’ve grown before are Louisa F1, Euphya F1, Luxury F1, Carmen F1, Bella F1, Lili F1.

The more middle sized cucumbers are Merlin F1, Emilie F1, Swing F1, Passandra F1, Delistar F1.

There lunchbox style that I now prefer are Mini Munch F1, Patio Snacker, Hopeline F1, Green Fingers F1, Party Time F1, Nimrod F1 … and the one I’m trying for the first time; Quick Snack F1.