good morning everyone this morning i wanted to share with you what is
unfortunately looking to be a giant garden fail this season this season i lost all
of my cucumber plants very early only getting two or three pickings off of any of my plants
before they died of bacterial wilt which is spread by cucumber beetles in hopes of getting
a later harvest i planted what was supposed to be a parthenocarpic variety underneath
netting with the idea being that parthenocarpic types do not require pollination for fruit set
therefore i would not have to take the netting off at any point to allow for insect pollination
with hopes that the cucumber beetles would not be able to ever get access to my plants
well i want to show you this morning what has happened with my little experiment
to set this up i transplanted my plants around the base of just a simple wooden
teepee trellis i placed some heavy duty supports in a roughly square pattern around the outside
and then just covered the whole thing with insect netting pinning it down with fabric pins
now the first thing you might notice is the obvious lack of cucumbers i have a lot of blossoms
a lot of teeny tiny little cucumbers but they are all aborting at a very small size because they did
not get pollinated which leads me to my first important point that i want to share with you
always buy from a trusted reputable seed source so i'm not going to name any names
but i got this seed from a place that i normally don't it was labeled as Arkansas little leaf which
is supposed to be a true parthenocarpic variety with a very wide range of disease resistances
and based on my results here the seed was not true to type it may have been a seller mix-up or
it may just be that they're not maintaining their stock seed well but this is obviously not a truly
parthenocarpic type whatever this is that i ended up with because this would not be aborting the
small fruit if it were i should have a full fruit set under this netting without pollination the
second major screw-up that i committed here was not following my cardinal rule of giving plants
adequate air circulation in this very small space i had three cucumbers planted that was way too
many i should have just had one the plant crowding in combination with being under the netting
really cut down on any kind of air circulation my summers here are very humid so we tend toward
a lot of fungal and bacterial foyer diseases and you can see that these plants are not healthy i
have a lot of foliar disease going on here based on the appearance of this foliage i've likely got
a strain of cucumber downy mildew interestingly the variety that this is supposed to be
Arkansas little leaf is supposed to be resistant to downy mildew now even resistant varieties can
succumb to a disease if the pressure is enough but the fact that this came down with the disease
it's supposed to be resistant to combined with the lack of fruit set definitely leads me to
believe there was some kind of seed mix up so valuable lessons going forward into next year
i will get my seed from a reputable seed source get a true parthenocarpic variety and i will only
plant one plant in this amount of space i'm hoping that not all is lost for the remainder of the
season i'm going to keep the netting off in hopes that some of these blooms that are appearing will
get pollinated by the bees and other pollinators and i may end up with a small amount of fruit set
and to deter the cucumber beetles from feeding off of these plants now that they're exposed
i'm going to do a regular spray with a kaolin clay product i'm going to use Surround
basically this is just a fine powdered kale and clay that you mix with water and you coat the
whole plant the idea being that insect pests don't like to walk on or chew through that clay coating
but it in no way harms the plants and it doesn't actually hurt any insects the only trouble that
i find with surround is that it does have to be reapplied frequently so if you get rain if you get
very heavy dew in the morning it will wash right off of the plants and i'd love to hear from you
if you have any tricks for fooling the cucumber beetles keeping them off of your cucumber plants
i would love to hear what has worked for you thanks for watching and i'll see you next time