Top Tips to Growing Cucumbers
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Whether you’ve grown cucumbers before, or this is your first time planting them, cucumbers are a great addition to your garden & harvest. Like any other plant, there’s some tips and tricks you can do to help them thrive and grow to the best of their abilities, and that’s what todays blog is all about! Let’s talk about my five tips to successfully growing cucumbers in your garden this summer.
1. If you’re starting cucumbers from seed, look at the seed-to-harvest date. I like to pick short & fast producing varieties. Purchasing starters is also a great route if you’re just starting out on your gardening adventure (check out my gardening e-book for beginner gardeners here!) Just be sure to not plant the neck of the starter deeper than they came in the pot as cucumbers are highly susceptible to transplant shock. As always, you can direct sow when your temperatures are consistently warm as they like warm soil.
2. You must provide a trellis or fencing for the plant to climb that is ideally 5 feet (this is the height of our climbing fence). If not, they will crawl and take over a bed. They need some room and vertical growing gives airflow.
3. If there’s one thing you take away from this list, let it be this – water is key! Water three times more than any other vegetable in your garden, after all cucumbers are around 95% water. Check with your fingers to see how wet the soil is as you don’t want to over water but I tend to water twice a day in the heat.
4. One great thing about cucumbers is the more you harvest, the more the plant produces! Don’t be afraid to harvest frequently throughout the season.
5. When picking a spot to plant, select a hot spot that is protected! The vines will grow up or along your raised bed, and you must ensure it gets plenty of sun. I will be hardening off my cucumbers this week (May 27-31, 2024) and planting out the first week of June as this year has been colder than usual in my zone in Canada (9). Before planting out, make sure your overnight temperatures are at least 10°C/50°F, otherwise you risk your plant dying, as cucumbers like warm temperatures/soil.
Lastly, three reasons why I LOVE to grow cucumbers in the garden:
I focus on growing veggies where we eat the skin. Even organic cucumbers at the store can still be sprayed or come in contact with pesticides
I love to pickle them! It’s my favourite thing to do in August and we like to use our own dill and garlic that we grow as well. Pickling recipe coming soon!
I love growing vining vegetables as they can grow up a trellis and saves so much space in the garden. Plus the kids love to pick them!
My favourite varieties are patio snacker (for pickling or eating fresh), tasty emperor (english cucumber) or cucamelons (in the picture below). Purchase our favourite cucumber seeds here!
Thank you for reading! Will you be growing cucumbers this gardening season? If so, what variety will you be growing? Let me know in the comments below!
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