I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we will cover the third and final phase of pruning and training cucumbers
to a trellis, so we'll take the camera into the high tunnel now and cover what
we do when cucumbers get to the top of the trellis.
Now once the cucumbers get up to the top of my trellis I want to get as much
vine producing fruits off as I can, so I will tie up here at the top...use some
twine...and don't want to tie it too tight, we don't want to pinch that stem off...we'll
tie that up there. And now at this point I will allow these secondary stems to
grow down - I won't break those off at the second node - I'll allow the secondary
stems to grow down, we'll let this come over, so we've got two or three these
secondary stems. I'll let this primary stem also grow
down, it'll just kind of hang down, so we'll have the primary stem coming down,
secondary stems. Another way - this is kind of a modified umbrella training system -
another way that you can do that is take a-another secondary stem and go out
across this way, so that you've got tertiary stems coming down this side off
from the secondary stem. So I could take this secondary stem and tie it up across
there and allow the tertiary stems to come down. The point here is the
secondary stems will come down and they'll send off tertiary stems and
those stems, we'll want to break them off two nodes out. So these stems will come
down and like we did on these secondary stems, going up primary stem, we broke
it off after two nodes, the tertiary stems coming off from the secondary
stems you break them off at two nodes. So we'll have this type of arrangement
coming off from these stems that are coming down; now we've got lots of nodes
in there producing lots of cucumbers, they're up off the ground, everything's
clean, easier to reach if you got a bad back.
Once you get them trained it's really quite a nice way to go. This will come
down, and once it's coming down we will just keep the secondary stems on two
nodes, two nodes out on each secondary stem of this primary stem that's coming
down. So we can have the cucumbers coming up across and down, and then we'll have
two or three trailing vines coming down on all of these vines from...from six - four
feet up, and then all of these coming down will have coming off at each node a
stem that will have two nodes out and then you break that off. So what I've
done here, I've got it coming up the trellis, the primary stem coming across,
and then I'm going to let it droop down. I'm going to let secondary stems, one, two,
three secondary stems come and droop down as well. I'll keep then the
tertiary stems two nodes out, tie this off - just a piece of twine, you can use a
zip tie, tie a square knot, granny knot, doesn't matter - although if you're a Boy
Scout you probably want to use a square knot. And that's how you get that tied to
the top and then come down. When you start getting these secondary stems two
nodes out that's when these tendrils get to really be kind of in the way, so
that's why you need to break these tendrils off. They'll grab on to the
leaves, they'll grab on to fruit, the Armenian cucumbers are long - they can get
up to almost three feet long - and that's just about ready to harvest
that - that Armenian cucumber. And we'll show some of these pickling cucumbers;
you want pickling cucumbers at a different size than your slicing
cucumbers, so we'll show pickling cucumbers and how to harvest. Alright you can see
at this node, or at this leaf axle, that we have a male flower right there and
then we have - this is actually a female flower because it's got the miniature
fruit at the...before the flower. Here is a pickling cucumber that is ready to
harvest; all I do is just grab it, break it off like that, they harvest quite
easily. And that's a good size for pickling cucumbers; if you like them
bigger you can pick them bigger, if you like them smaller you can pick them smaller. But
these pickling cucumbers tend to put out lots of female flowers at each leaf
node whereas sometimes the slicing cucumbers will only put out one female
flower at each each axle and each node there. So that's how you harvest them -
pretty easy. All right so we see this small female flower here: the flower
actually hasn't opened yet, so this one hasn't been pollinated. Once that opens
up and gets pollinated it only takes a day or so to get to this
size; once that flower kind of dies - starts to die off - it'll take a day or so
to get that size. So you really need to harvest these probably...you need to be
out there every other day or so to check for cucumbers before they get too big.
Now this is a slicing cucumber, it's a gynesis cucumber, which means that it
doesn't have male flowers on it just female flowers and it's able to develop
the fruit without actually being pollinated - they've developed cucumbers
that can do that. Notice the difference in size: slicing cucumber, this one
didn't develop the seeds down here in the end of the fruit, but you cut that
off and peel that. That's a perfectly good cucumber, just break off the stem -
just kind of twist it just a little bit as you pop it off and that breaks off at
the stem right there, and there's some good cucumbers for lunch today. You'll
notice that as the top grows up these older leaves will get old - that's kind of
what happens in life - when they get to a certain stage you can just break those
off, kind of keep things cleaned up. You'll also notice here that I have a secondary
stem trying to grow out again from that leaf axel so I just go ahead and take
that off again, and we'll take off these old leaves and kind of keep things
cleaned up a little bit. That way we've got the fresh new growth, the old growth
is really not doing much good, we've got that growing up. Now yield wise you're
going to get probably less fruit per plant than if you were to allow
it to sprawl out - all out - around your garden, but you will get more fruit per
square foot because you're growing your your fruit up instead of spreading it
out. So you can get more cucumbers per square foot growing it this way than if
you allow it to spread out. So if you've got a small garden and you want
to have fair number cucumbers off of your plants this is a good way to go; if
it's a little too complicated or you're scared to break them off, well, you'll
just have to learn to be tough because that's how you get them trained to a
trellis. Otherwise go ahead and let them sprawl out on the ground, but this is a
good way to have fun in your garden.