all right everyone welcome back to digging deeper this week on the show we're doing a crop focus
on one of my favorite and one of the biggest money maker on the farm here we're doing kooks
cucumbers are again like i said they can be real money makers you know we sell these lebanese
cucumbers a dollar to a dollar fifty a pop and they these plants once they start to give they
can really really give for up to six seven weeks and the problem with cucumbers usually is that
they're very sensitive to a lot of the disease there's they're sensitive to a lot of fungi and
when they're outside you'll plant them you get like one bumper harvest another and then
that's pretty much it most of the plants after a couple of weeks of harvest they just kind of
disintegrate that's not even talking about the cucumber beetle and the squash bugs and other
insects that can really attack it so by growing them inside there's a couple of things that really
make a huge difference the first one is that you can trace them and by growing them upward you
know they're not on the soil and so they're less susceptible to get a lot of soil borne diseases
but most importantly you just get so much more revenue per square foot because you're maximizing
the plant's capacity to really give a lot of production on a smaller amount of
square footage and so that's really you know as market gardeners or square footage is prime
prime value you need to maximize every inch of it and by growing and tracing the cucumbers
that makes a big difference but also by growing them inside beside the fact that you can be
earlier and later we can also put insect nets and then we have a lot of insects like the cucumber
beetle that just can't get in and so we're protecting our crop it makes a huge difference
and all in all it gives us plants that are super healthy super productive for about you know four
or five times longer than if we were to put the plants outside like like a lot of growers or a
lot of gardeners one good reason why i would think growers could do grow them outside is if you want
to have bumper crops like big fields of one or two harvest that's that's how the big farms do it
they just lay it out loud they do one or two big bumper crop they bring that to wholesale and
it's like boom boom but for me the investment of growing these plants planting them setting them up
it's not worth it if you're not going to harvest it for long enough so yeah i think when i was a
beginning farmer we did we did those cubes outside it was a nightmare every time and ever since we
started to grow them inside and when we learned how to grow them well the difference is amazing
there's a few tricks about learning how to do this well but once you've mastered it man
this is a skill set that you'll have with you for many many years it's gonna improve your
productivity big time so i'm a big proponent of growing cukes inside and i think you should too
so this is it for this week i hope you enjoyed the video cubes are a big part of
our operation here at the farm um you want to learn more there's the cheat sheet you can
download that you can check out our work at the market gardener institute but i'm really happy
that you're here i'm really happy that people are giving their comments i read everything
but i don't comment back because we're busy at the farm and it's summertime
i hope things are growing your way things are doing great where i'm happy and see you next week
you