Cucumbers: good news and bad

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

My “Cucumber experience” has been a bit mixed this year. One of my plants got flattened (and killed) by heavy rain; one never got going at all, and now two more have just spontaneously died. It’s amazing how quickly a Cucumber plant can die! One day it looks fine, and the next it’s a limp shrivelled wreck. I conducted a “post mortem” on the two recent casualties and I found that their roots had been completely eaten away, but by what I know not. In the container there is now just one Cucumber plant remaining, and to be honest it doesn’t look strong. The Cucamelons, on the other hand, look fine and are growing enthusiastically.

The remaining Cucumber plant has so far produced only one fruit, though it does have another one forming – seen here:

Fortunately, I have two more cucumber plants elsewhere. One of them is that unknown variety that has grown from a seed that nearly got sent to a friend [Read the story HERE.]. You can see it in the middle of this group of pots.

I honestly have no idea what type it is – it’s probably not even an outdoor type – but we’ll soon see.

The last line of defence is the spare “Diva” plant that I couldn’t bear to throw away, the one squeezed in near my Philadelphus tree. It’s actually looking pretty good and is now about 4 feet tall and happily climbing its bamboo wigwam:

It has its first flower too, so maybe it will soon produce its first fruit.

The loss of  Cucumber plants like these can be particularly galling because they are expensive plants to raise. A packet of seeds costs about £3 or £4, and typically contains only 5 seeds if it’s an F1 variety. I’m lucky in that I have not lost out financially because my seeds were very kindly supplied FOC by Marshalls – but it’s still annoying to lose plants that you have nurtured, before they have a chance to deliver a crop.

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