Cucumbers are a very popular vegetable, and they're a great crop to grow because they
can be so high yielding. But I haven't tried growing cucumbers outside yet as I don't think
they would do well in the Irish climate, with the cooler temperatures and the higher winds that we
tend to get. They do seem happier growing in the warmth and sheltered conditions of the polytunnel,
where it's also easier to hang them from the polytunnel structure above, which keeps the plants
up off the ground, and generally leads to better quality cucumbers that are easier to find amongst
all the foliage. I generally grow salad varieties of cucumbers that produce the long juicy fruit
that so many people like to eat, but I've also grown a more dual purpose cucumber in the past,
that I used to make a sliced sweet pickle. More recently I've been growing varieties that have
been bred specifically for pickling, producing cucumbers with a drier flesh and the possibility
of many more cucumbers being produced on each plant. This year I explored several
different methods for growing these varieties in order to produce lots of really small cucumbers
for making pickled gherkins, as well as letting them grow for making different types of pickles,
and we were able to harvest a huge amount of pickling cucumbers from these plants.
Pickles are not a common thing here in Ireland, and generally not that available in the shops,
though this is changing as the population becomes more diverse. Historically this is not a pickling
culture, and there's not a lot of knowledge around about making pickles, and it's even hard to find
jars that are big enough and cheap enough for making lots of pickles. which is very different
from the culture that I grew up with in Canada. Most of the cucumber varieties that are available
for growing here in Ireland are intended to be eaten raw, with juicier flesh that makes them
more difficult to make pickles out of, though it's not impossible. In the past I've grown a
variety that I considered to be dual purpose, that produced large fruit with a slightly drier flesh
that was quite good for making sliced pickles. But I wanted to try growing varieties that could
produce a lot of much smaller cucumbers that I could use for making small whole pickle gherkins,
as well as letting them grow a bit for making other types of pickles. I have been experimenting
with two hybrid varieties for this, and both of them seem to produce cucumbers with a drier
flesh and a thinner skin, and seem to be able to produce a much greater number of fruit,
but only if I grow them in a different way. The method that I've been using for growing
the salad cucumbers involves winding the single main stem up of a length of twine hung from the
polytunnel structure. And I would make sure to pinch off of the side shoots,
leaving only a single female flower to grow into one fruit at each leaf node. And for some of the
larger varieties I would remove the immature fruit or female flower from every second leaf node to
reduce the number of fruit that the plant had to grow. And these rapidly growing single vines
would need to be dropped quite regularly, and I would prune off all of the leaves and developing
shoots at ground level, leaving only leaves and fruit to develop on the upper hanging part of
the plant. I've had good success with this common method of heavily pruning closely spaced plants,
which is designed to encourage the plants to produce fewer fruit over a longer growing season,
which will hopefully be better quality. But I would need to train and prune the plants
quite differently in order to encourage them to produce many more smaller cucumbers for pickling.
It's hard to find any information about how to grow these cucumber plants in order to get
them to produce a huge number of much smaller cucumbers for pickling, especially within the
confined space of a polytunnel. I've tried a few different methods in the past, both hanging the
plants and allowing them to grow along the soil surface. But this year I decided to do a side
by-side comparison of two different methods, using the two varieties of pickling cucumbers. With one
set of the two varieties, I planted 14 plants quite close together in a double row and allowed
the main vine to climb up a length of twine hung from the polytunnel structure, but I allowed all
of the side shoots to develop, and only cut them back to prevent them from growing too long. With
another batch of eight plants, four from each variety, I planted them at a wider spacing,
on a longer section of the bed, each of these plants having more than three times the area of
the hanging plants. And I allowed these plants to grow out over the surface of the bed, only
pruning them back to prevent them from growing out over the paths. I also used two bent wire frames
for some of these plants to grow over, which I had originally created to help support bush
bean plants, and as I thought that this would help keep the vines up off the soil and make
them easier to harvest. So with one set there were more plants in a smaller space growing vertically,
and in the other set there were fewer plants with larger space to grow horizontally,
either over the soil surface or up over a wire frame. And it was interesting to see
how they developed and grew and how much time the different methods took to manage and harvest from
I sowed the seeds in mid May and transplanted them into the polytunnel 3 weeks later,
in the first week of June, and I was able to harvest the first small cucumbers from all of
the plants in the first week of July, 7 weeks after sowing the seeds. The horizontal plants
only needed to be pruned back a few times to prevent them from growing over the paths too much,
but it wasn't such a big deal so long as I could get down the paths for harvesting. The plants
filled the beds and grew up over the frames quite quickly with lots of branching and overlapping
side shoots. Apart from a bit of pruning and helping the first leaders onto the top of the
wire frames, and a lot of watering and feeding, these plants were easy to manage. But harvesting
was more difficult and time consuming with these plants, searching through the foliage to find all
of the small cucumbers before they grew larger than I wanted them to. It was easier to see the
cucumbers hanging down below the wire frames, but it was actually more difficult to harvest from
these as I had to work through the holes in the wire frames, and I found myself wishing that they
were much higher off the ground so I didn't have to bend down so low. This hanging fruit was better
quality compared to the ones lying on the soil surface, especially later in the season when the
decaying leaves and cooler temperature and less air movement led to more fruit and vines decaying.
The hanging plants took more work every few days to make sure that the growing
leader wound up the twine, and to prune back the side shoots that were growing too far
out. I found it difficult to find a balance between letting all the side shoots grow to
produce a greater number of flower clusters but to also prevent overcrowding and making
it more difficult to find all of the cucumbers for harvesting when they were small. And the two
varieties seem to respond differently to this pruning. One variety produced a greater number
of flower clusters with more flowers in each cluster, and the other variety produce fewer,
and I suspect that it might be better to train and prune each of these varieties in different ways to
produce different sized fruit. When these plants grew enough to reach the top of the polytunnel I
lowered them in place and then pruned out all of the lower leaves and side shoots,
clearing the space at the ground level. With many cucumbers growing at the upper parts of the vine,
harvesting was easier with less bending over and it was easier to spot most of
the cucumbers before they got too big. So I spent a lot less time harvesting,
but more time pruning and winding up these plants, and these plants also overshadowed the
adjacent beds a lot more which is another factor I need to consider. I suspect that these climbing
plants would have produced for longer into the autumn than the horizontal growing plants,
as it was easier to clean up the plants and remove the decaying leaves and to allow a greater
air movement within the vines. Unfortunately these plants suffered from some feeding issues
and became infested with spider mite later in the season, just as the horizontal plants were
becoming more of a mess to deal with, so I ended up giving up on both batches by mid September.
At the beginning of the harvest season I was trying to harvest from all of the plants every
2 or 3 days, in order to catch most of the cucumbers at that much smaller size that I
needed to make the particular type of pickled gherkin that I wanted to make. This was a lot
of work searching through all of the vines several times a week, especially with the plants that were
growing horizontally. In the middle of the season I was harvesting every 4 or 5 days,
which meant that some of the cucumbers got to be quite a bit bigger, and later in the season
as the weather cooled down, and I got bored with harvesting, this extended to about once a week.
But with all of these harvest I would pick all of the cucumbers that were of usable size all at
the same time, from the smallest gherkins up to the larger ones that already had immature seeds
developing inside. In the kitchen I would pull out the smaller ones for making pickled gherkins,
slice up the larger ones for a sweet pickle, and even use some of the medium sized ones for making
a lacto-fermented pickle. Harvesting a mix of sizes all at once made a lot more sense, as I
could simply pick any of the cucumbers that were even remotely large enough to use, which would
actually extend the time until I needed to harvest again, and I could make more of one type of pickle
and less of the other depending on how fast the growth had been, and how long I had waited until
the next harvest. And I made a lot of pickles in July and August, which I processed and stored
for eating throughout the year, and whenever I felt that I didn't have enough time to make more
pickles I was able to give the harvest to friends who were delighted to be able to make their own.
Over the 10 week harvest period, we were able to harvest about 180 kg of pickling cucumbers from
all of these plants, which is a huge amount. And with the recipes I use this would translate to
about 260 litre or quart jars of pickles. I was able to make enough pickles for ourselves and
to give away, and there are plenty of cucumbers to give to friends so that they can pickle for
themselves. And all of this was harvested from less than 10 m of a bed in one of the polytunnels
which translates to a bit less than 8 square meters of bed. I think that is is a high yield
no matter how you look at it, and from plants that suffered later in the season, which was actually
a bit of a relief because I was getting tired from all the harvesting and making pickles. One variety
seemed to produce more than the other, and the plants that had more space to grow horizontally
produced about three times the amount of cucumbers as the same plants growing vertically with less
space. But comparing the amount of kilograms per square meter the difference wasn't so significant.
Adding up the harvest as the season progressed, or the yield per area for both sets of plant,
the vertical plants did produce more, and it was really interesting to see how consistent
the harvest were throughout the whole harvest season. I think part of this was that the more
frequent harvests of the smaller cucumbers happened earlier in the season, when there
was more warmth and faster growth, and later in the season the cucumbers would have had a chance
to grow larger with the delayed harvests, even though the temperature would have been cooler.
And the weight of the cucumbers harvested ended up being fairly consistently about 19 kg per week,
from the full crop which translated into about 25 jars of pickles that I could make each week.
Even with the disease and pest issues cutting short the season this was a really good crop,
but I think it might make more sense to grow a larger area of even more plants for a shorter
part of the growing season, if I had the space. The harvest would be bigger each week from more
plants, and with the faster growth from the extra warmth we often get at the beginning
of the summer. And then when I had enough, or got bored with it all, or got too busy to keep up with
the more frequent harvests, I could simply pull out all the pickling cucumbers, and get another
crop into the poly tunnel space. To have a shorter and more intensive pickling season. I think this
may be a better option than putting in the work to try to get the plants to produce for longer,
which is a strategy that I generally use for the salad cucumbers and a lot of other crops,
where I try to produce a fresh crop for a longer part of the season, where possible. As with so
many other crops, harvesting is a task that takes up the most time with these pickling cucumbers,
and it does make a certain amount of sense to put in the extra effort to hang these cucumbers,
to make the harvesting faster and I think the regular pruning and the care for the
hanging plants will allow them to produce a better crop for longer in the season,
if that's what I want. But if I only wanted to produce pickling cucumbers for a shorter period,
during the hottest part of the Irish summers, then perhaps it's simply easier to let them grow on the
surface of the soil, or on a piece of cardboard or a ground cover fabric, to keep the cucumbers
from touching the soil. I like the idea of seeing this as a quick crop, if I have the space. To get
larger harvests for preserving when the conditions are better and the plants are younger. But either
way, it's great to be able to produce so many pickling cucumbers, and to be able to make so many
of own pickles, especially when living in a place where really good pickles are quite hard to buy.
The pickles that I make are starting to become quite popular with friends and neighbours,
and it's easy to see how I could expand the area growing pickling cucumbers,
and to make a lot more pickles for supplying within my community, to turn it into a bit of a
side business. But then I need to remind myself that it's more important to focus my time and
available polytunnel space on all the trials and explorations that I do into all kinds of different
areas of growing food. And to share what I learned and experience through this YouTube channel,
to help more people grow more of their own food, because that is the purpose of this RED Gardens
Project. if you would like to support this work, and have the spare resources, please check out
the links to my Patreon and PayPal accounts in the video description. Any contribution helps,
as does the usual liking, sharing and subscribing, but more importantly thank you for watching.