I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University in Carbon County.
Today we're going to talk about cucumbers and how to prune and train them to a trellis.
Cucumbers, like tomatoes, are a favorite vegetable plant in our gardens, but they just take up
a lot of space.
So if you don't have a lot of space putting them on a trellis can help a lot.
Now I have my trellis set up, which has got a one inch PVC pipe across the top, and it's
got the twine to fasten the cucumbers to, and then down at the bottom I have a half
inch PVC to give it a little bit more sturdiest - sturdiness.
The cucumbers don't like to flop and twist around in the wind; they don't tolerate that
very well.
So I've got this bottom piece here to help kinda ste-steady that - the twine string that
I'm gonna trellis these cucumbers to.
Now as we are going to fasten these cucumber vines to the twine we want to understand a
little bit about how cucumbers grow, so that we can do this in such a way that we get good
growth on them.
Part of the concept that the commercial growers use is they want to get as much vegetative
growth on there as they can on it, before the flowering starts to kick in energy - they
want to get a good plant growth.
So once these cucumbers get to about...eight or ten inches, I want to make sure I get them
fastened to my twine so that they don't flop around, they don't start bending over.
When they get about eight inches they'll get a little bit top heavy and...and fall over
to the ground and it's a little bit tougher to get them straightened back up.
So when they get about eight, ten inches you want to make sure you get them fastened to
the twine.
So we'll pull the camera in here now, we'll look at - closely at what we're doing to get
these cucumbers so can fasten them into - onto the twine and get that vegetative growth going
before...before we worry about the flowers.
Now we have here the primary stem, the main stem, and then we have secondary stems, and
eventually we would have tertiary stems, or the branch-branches off from that.
We want to get this primary stem to grow up and get as tall as we can as quickly as we
can.
So we're going to break off - up to about two feet - we're going to break off all these
primary stems...all of them.
Or the secondary stems, I should say, we'll need the primary stem, of course.
And we're also going to break off all these flowering buds.
We want vegetative growth, we don't want the plant trying to put energy into any flowers
at this point.
We get the vegetative growth up there, and besides that, this gets us down low; we want
to be able to keep the cucumbers up off the ground - keeps them clean, easier to manage.
And because we're going to be tying these to a twine, we really don't need the tendrils
either so we'll break those off so they don't get in the way.
And we will leave that, so that now we have basically just this primary stem coming up,
and as it goes we'll just keep clipping that and breaking off all the secondary stems up
to about two feet.
So we just clip that plant clip on there; the plant clip fastens onto the twine...right
like this, it grabs on to the twine there, and it will hold - it won't slip up and down
the twine - it'll hold that plant up in place.
Now, typically, I like to put a low one down here at the beginning, just to keep it good
and...and held in there in a good...in a good fashion.
So now we've got that one ready to go, and as that grows up to about two feet - the first
two feet of growth - we will take off all those secondary branches and...and the flowers.
When we go from two feet to four feet, we'll take off the secondary branches but leave
the flowers, and then from four feet on up...we'll talk about that as we go later.
We're going to cover this throughout the season, so as the season goes on, we'll show - add
a little more onto this clip so that you can see what goes on throughout the growing season.
But that's how you get your cucumbers started on the trellis.
Just to show quickly how these plant clips work, they've got this little dog ear thing,
and as that closes that will pinch around the twine.
So I just put that twine into that...pinch it.
Now to get some of these plant clips you can just go into your search engine and type in
'plant clips' and you should be able to find a source for those, if you can't find them
locally.
It's kind of hard to find these things in some of the rural garden centers, but again,
you just go on, search for plant clips.
These are good, fairly cheap, piece and they speed up the trellising process a lot to use
this plant clip.
So we'll just do another one real quick here: take off the secondary stems, the little flower
buds - they break off fairly easily - you gotta be gentle you don't bust your primary
stem.
You have to take of the...this plant's got some good growth on it, we should have cucumbers
here in...probably another three or four weeks we'll have cucumbers...put on my plant clip.
Get that leaf down underneath so it's not bending so bad.
Fasten that one.
And then about every third or fourth node I will put another plant clip on.
This is still stretching, so you don't want to get too...too carried away and...and it'll
try to bend up there, so you want to give it a little bit of growth room; make sure
that you get that elongation between your leaf axles - each node here - get the elongation.
And then put your plant clip on.
So we've got one on there, that'll get it going, when it gets a little taller, I'll
put another plant clip on.