Cucumber 'Early Fortune'

These are very prolific plants in my opinion. Once they get going, they grow rapidly and set tons of fruit (vegetables?). We planted a fe...Read Morew close to a chain link fence and they reached the top after a month and are growing along the top now. We haven’t had any problems with cucumber beetles yet, Knock on wood, which normally ruin our crop.

I purchased these seeds from Seed Savers Exchange and planted them on 14 May in large containers along with bush beans at their feet. The...Read More vines have grown about 6 feet along a trellis and are loaded with yellow blossoms. The first baby cucumberlet appeared about two weeks ago and is now about 5-6 inches long. The vines are loaded with yellow flowers and lately I've seen several other babylets ( 1/2 to 1 inch cucumbers) on the vines and hope they reach maturity.

I expected a lot more than one cucumber by this time, but temps here lately have been very high and I understand their development is temporarily halted during high temps. The mature fruit is said to be about 7-8 inches in length.

At planting I crumbled dry eggshells onto the surface to deter slugs and once had to spray Safer bug spray on the plants to keep off some mysterious bug that was eating the leaves. Lately I've seen some gigantic bumbling irredescent bug hanging out on the vines, and one small caterpillar, and a few leaves have some imperfections but I'm not willing to spray again with a chemical, and as long as the vines produce relatively good looking fruits I won't use another spray, prefering to hand pick.

About every 7-10 days I give them a diluted liquid fertilizer after a good watering.

The vines are planted in containers measuring about 14 inches wide by 14 inches deep, (not sure how many gallons that is )placed in full sun, and watered regularly. The vines seem to be doing well in that size container but they are very dense and I worry that the vines would act as a "sail" if we got a stiff wind, resulting in the whole contraption being blown over.

I planted some morning glories and moon flowers in the same pots, not sure if that has affected their growth, m. glories being of the Solanales Convolvulaceae family and distantly related to other Nightshades such as tomatoes and peppers, so maybe there is an adverse relationship resulting in slower production of fruit.

I believe this was the type we grew this year. It was our first time attempting cucumbers. From what I've read cucumber have shallow root...Read Mores. I got the pine straw, hay, & goat poop from the sheds and placed on top of the ground around the plants.

The smartest thing I did was take two metal T-Post and drive them in at around a 35 degree angle. Then I placed a 4 foot by 8 foot run of cow panel on them and tied it in. The smart thing about this was you could look under the wire and see your cucumbers other wise you would have to search deligently through your vines for harvest. Often you would find a huge one that had finally got so big it couldn't help but be seen.

The other new thing we done was to take the huge cucumbers (the one that folks say is to big to eat), sliced them like tomatoes, then fried. To me they are so much better than a fried green tomatoe! My wife also put up a couple dozen jars of "bread & butter" pickles using the cucumbers.

This is another plant that gets in trouble with the sun around July.

Fruits are 7-8" long by 2" diameter. 55-60 days.