I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Now that the cucumbers have been started on the trellis and they're growing well,
it's time to learn how to do that second phase of the pruning for the trellising
system. I use as a reference for the bottom two feet, I'll train them up to
about the top of my knee - a couple inches above my knee, and then at about my solar
plexus is four feet, so I'll use those as my reference as far as where I prune to
do what on these. Remember we're trying to get that vegetative growth down in
that bottom two feet; we're trying to take off all of the secondary branches
and the flowering buds, everything, except for the leaves on that primary branch. We
get that to come up and at about two feet then, when it gets about this tall, that's
when we want to start looking at taking off just the vegetative branch and
leaving the flower buds. We'll let those flowers grow and we'll have cucumbers
off from there. So every...at every leaf axle there will be a cluster of flowers -
or flower buds depending on the type of cucumber that it is - we'll have flowers
in there and we'll get at least one fruit at each leaf axle if we don't
break those off. So we'll come in close and take a look at those we can tell how
to differentiate between the flower buds and the vegetative buds and then we'll
show how to do that. Alright now that we've got these up to this height we're
still taking off, from two feet to four feet we're taking off, the vegetative but
we're leaving the flower buds. So here we can see that we have a vegetative growth,
right there, got one down here, you'll break these off...just a very easy little
break off...Now here it's getting a little bit more difficult to tell the
vegetative from the flower, but the vegetative has this leaf off to one side
then the flower clusters are off on this side. So we can just kind of gently push
on that one and roll that off; now that one's ready for us to...to clip to the
trellis and then we'll show what we do after we
get past the four feet. So we'll move over to a little bit taller plant and show
how...show what we're looking at on a four foot, from four feet to six feet.
Now these Armenian cucumbers have a little bit different growth habit, or at
least the stems elongate more than the other cucumbers typically do, but I can
show you on these because they've grown up tall enough that I can show you. Here we
have the primary stem coming up, and this is the secondary stem, and then we have
some tertiary stems coming off here. What we want to do after four feet is from
about my solar plexus up we want to keep those buds that are at the - the
vegetative buds at the secondary - at the leaf axle - and take it out two nodes on
this secondary stem. So we'll keep this vegetative...we want to have the flowering
buds come on, you'll have flower buds again on - again the Armenian is
a little bit different - but you'll have flower buds at each of these leaf
axles on your regular cucumbers. So you can just break off the vegetative growth
there so all you've got is the secondary stem coming out. And that's what we'll do
with these cucumbers as they come up from the four to six foot range: we will keep that
secondary stem for two nodes, we'll allow the flowering buds at each one of these
nodes develop into fruit. So to reiterate then, the first two feet we just want
primary stem vegetative growth: take off all the flower buds, take off all the
secondary stems. The second two feet we will leave the flower buds at each leaf
axle and break off the secondary stems, and then from four feet to six feet we will
allow that secondary stem to grow out two nodes, and break off any vegetative
growth at those nodes and keep the flowers and all of them, so we'll have
flower clusters on several nodes. We'll get lots of cucumbers and have lots of
fun. So there you go: that's another way to have fun in your garden.