Cucumbers are a classic garden staple. While they have limited uses in their raw form, pickles are a great long term snack. While many foods can be pickled cucumbers are the rare exception that actual just gets to be called pickles when the process is complete. Cucumbers also come in many varieties, some make perfect for salads, others designed for pickles, and others still in a variety of shapes and sizes.
Cucumber Details:
- Family: Cucurbitaceae
- Growing Season: Any time after soil reaches 60F (15C)
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 18-36 inches (46-90 cm) apart depending on variety
- Seed to Harvest time: 50-70 days
- Indoor Starting: 3-4 weeks before the last frost
- Earliest Planting: Once soil temperatures are above 60F (15C)
- Watering: Water whenever soil is dry, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not over water. Slow drip irrigation works well for cucumbers.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: plant starters or seeds outside once the soil is up to temp. Seeds should be planted 1/2 inch deep keeping spacing in mind. Use well fertilized soil with a good amount of compost.
- Weeding: Weed frequently as cucumbers and be disrupted by larger weeds. When weeding try not to disturb the roots of your plants.
- Harvesting: Harvest cucumbers with garden snips to cut them off the vine. This will keep the plant healthy as it grows more fruits. Be sure to pick cucumbers before they reach full maturity or it will cause the plant to slow growth or stop production of additional fruits.
- Known Pests: Snails and slugs, remove manually. In raised beds a salt strip can be used to keep snails and slugs from climbing the lip of the bed.
More About Cucumbers
Cucumbers are a vining plant and they spread out quite a bit. While this can be a space sink if you have limited growing room, the nice thing is their vining nature allows you to trellis them quite easily. We never did this as a kid growing up in Michigan, and we lost a huge amount of garden space to it which gave us only a handful of good cucumbers a year. Now, on our own homestead with our own garden, we’ve trellised our cucumbers which have lead to huge savings in space as well as superior yields. Trellised cucumbers are also much easier to monitor for snails and slugs, ultimately making them easier to raise overall.
Cucumber Tasting and Food Notes
We love cucumbers and pickles here at GetHomesteading, so we’re a little biased. Not everyone enjoys them as much as we do though. Cucumbers have a light bitter flavor with a cool refreshing crunch. As fruits go they aren’t sweet even though they are quite watery.
Cucumbers are a staple of salads in the US. If you’re more about the cucumbers own flavor and don’t want to mix it in with other greens, cucumber sandwiches are great with a little salt and butter on a simple white or sourdough bread.
Beyond these applications there are a few cucumber recipes for drinks and soups, but their uses are less common than those listed above. Cucumbers essentially don’t cook well and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone doing anything to them with heat.
What they lack in cooking potential they certainly make up for with their ability to become pickles. Cucumbers transform from a semi-bitter and watery fruit into an amazingly zingy crunchy snack when you make them into pickles. Pickles are great on a ton of foods, but also easily become an ingredient for sauces and other mixed foods. Both Chicken salad and tuna salad are made complete with pickles and we can’t imagine a burger without them anymore. And while pickles are a vinegary sweet taste explosion, they also get points for being able to keep for extremely long times.
Should I Grow Cucumbers In My Garden?
The real question here is whether or not you like pickles. If you like pickles even a little, cucumbers are worth growing just for that. As part of a homestead garden pickles are a fantastic long term preserved food and cucumbers are stupidly easy to grow. If you don’t like cucumbers, the fruit alone is not impressive enough in its own uses for us to fully recommend it solely on its non-pickled form.
One final question you’ll need to ask yourself is what variety of cucumber is right for you. There are many and you may have better luck with bush varieties or vining varieties depending on your needs. We grow several types in our own gardens, so make sure you look into the different types available to you in your area.