Cucumbers are one of the popular summer vegetables that most of us grow in our gardens. Some grow them in greenhouses and others outside, some buy seedlings and others grow them from seeds, but we all encounter the same problems and joys with cucumbers. 

The biggest issue with cucumbers heat and moisture. They love their heat and need high temperatures to grow, but also roots like their moisture and leaves don’t enjoy the direct sun. This is why it can be difficult to find them a perfect spot in the garden. 

I have the same problem in my garden. I just can’t find them a spot they’ll like. 

This year started very harshly, with an extremely cold spring. Cucumbers, which I normally sow in the garden directly or start in pots outside, couldn’t be started outside due to the low temperatures. 

Cucumbers enjoy temperatures above 15°C(59°F), but for germination, they prefer temperatures over 25°C(77°F) and this can be very difficult to achieve when daily temperatures in April don’t go over 10°C(50°F). To make things even harder pickled cucumbers want even higher temperatures and everything under 20°C is a growth stopper for them. 

This is why my seeds germinated very poorly this year, some didn’t even germinate and in May I had no seedlings to plant. They had to wait until June to be ready for planting.

The interesting thing is that once the temperatures were high enough to encourage my seedlings to grow, they were also high enough for my garden sown plants to germinate so now I really have no difference between garden sown pickled cucumbers and the ones I’ve started in April. 

Since I had problems growing my early sown pickled cucumbers I didn’t even bother sowing sliced cucumbers. Instead, I bought 10 seedlings to have an early production. And they are giving fruits already. The ones I’d sow would never be this big as the ones that grew in the greenhouse on the family farm.

The problem with slicing cucumbers is the heat we’re having. I didn’t expect the beginning of the summer to be this hot. Especially since the past couple of years were colder. I’ve planted my cucumbers in a sunny spot in the garden and now it’s visible they are suffering from the heat. The leaves are burned and the plants stopped growing. They probably won’t survive long if we continue having so many sunny days. 

Pickled cucumbers on the other hand have been planted in the shaded part and they are thriving right now. They have all the needed heat with almost no direct sun. But if the weather changes and we get rain and colder weather they will probably get badly affected by blight while the sunburned ones will recuperate and start growing again.

This is why I’m considering sowing the cucumbers on many different parts of the garden next year and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve sown cucumbers as a second crop on my onion bed. They don’t need a too long time to grow. 50-70 days is plenty of time for them to start giving fruits and the sunny part of the garden should be warm enough for them until October, of course, if we won’t have an extremely hot or wet rest of the summer.

 

All in all, right now I have 3 cucumber beds all in different stages of growth. If the weather will be kind I should have continuous production until late fall.