Caring you Growing and Fruiting Cucumber Plant
As you have passed the phase of sowing or transplanting the Cucumber, now most of the work is needed to be done by the nature. However, there are few measures that you should carry on during entire life of your Cucumber to get best results.
- Many of readers when ask for tips regarding how to grow Cucumber in vegetable garden, my first answer is sun and water. Cucumber loves water and sun. As long as these two resource inputs are available, you will get best results. Plant your Cucumber where it has at least 8 hours access to sunlight. Similarly, water you Cucumber daily, especially at the fruiting stage, more water is needed as compare to growing stage.
- Best time of watering is morning or evening. Similarly use, Soaker hose or drip irrigation to avoid damping of foliage. Wet foliage can easily be a victim of any disease.
- Provide mulch to hold water.
- Setting up trellises early is recommended to avoid any seedling or vine damage.
- Once fruit is on the vine, don’t allow Cucumbers to grow too large as they will get bitter.
- At peak time of fruiting, you should harvest Cucumbers after every couple of days.
- They are picked and tastes best when the seeds inside Cucumber are not hard. Don’t let your Cucumbers become yellow. The best taste and crispy Cucumber is one that is uniformly green.
- A Cucumber left on vine for a longer period of time will become hard from outside and affect the plant productivity.
- Once picked, wrap them in plastic sheet as Cucumbers are 90 percent water. Without wrapping they will lose moisture easily.
- Cucumber can stay fresh for 10 days if stored properly in refrigerator.
Compost
You have found that I am recommending again and again the usage of compost. This is because organic vegetable gardening has its own taste. The fruits have natural nutrients and healthy for human body. So always try to use compost instead of synthetics.
Learn How to Prepare your Own Compost at Home
Sugar Spray
It is a common observation and query from my readers that their Cucumber vine has many yellow flowers but they are not bearing any fruit. Let me clear that this is not a disease. Cucumber has both male and female flowers on same plant. If you are not seeing fruit, this is mainly because of lack of pollination by the bees due to cold temperature or rainfall. A natural way to increase pollination is to spray sugar mix in water on Cucumber plant. This will attract bees that will act as natural pollinator for the Cucumber plant.
I hope the question ‘how to grow Cucumber in vegetable garden’ is answered well. Don’t forget to share this post and like my page.
Healthy growing and eating 🙂
Cite this Article in APA Style as:
[box type=”note” align=”aligncenter” ]Rahman, M. A. (2017, September 23). How to Grow Cucumber in Your Vegetable garden | Kitchen Gardening [Blog Post]. Retrieved from http://aridagriculture.com/2017/09/23/grow-cucumber-vegetable-garden-kitchen-gardening[/box]