Home Vegetable Gardening: Growing Cucumbers

By Author: Michael Podlesny
Total Articles: 174
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Cucumbers are a great vegetable to grow in any garden. They are excellent for salads, or to simply dip in some ranch dressing (or your favorite flavor).

There are a variety of great dishes you can make with cucumbers and if you have time to learn it, the skill of "pickling" can take your cucumber even further.

More importantly though, is, all of that is for naught if your vegetable garden does not produce plenty of healthy cucumbers.

Here are some steps you can take to increase your chances of healthy and more abundant harvest in your home vegetable garden.

Most cucumber plants grow on a vine. Although there are varieties that have been engineered to grow on a bush, chances are the seeds you are buying in the stores or online will produce a cucumber plant that wants to climb. Given that you have already picked the spot in your garden (full sun of course) where your cucumbers will go, the first step is to put in a trellis to give your plants a place to go and grow. Once they start growing, the vines should work themselves up the trellis. If they do not, that is ok, you can help it along by doing ...
... some light maneuvering. Your trellis can be as simple as some fencing attached to wooden poles to the one shown in the picture.

When you are ready to plant the cucumber seeds it is best to sow them one half inch to one inch deep into the soil for optimal germination no earlier than one week past the last frost date as specified in your area on the USDA website.

Even though you are growing your cucumbers up a trellis, you should not space the seeds any closer than eighteen inches when planting.

Cucumbers should always be planted in full sun with moderate watering until the cucumber plant starts flowering. Then once it has started to flower, water heavy throughout the harvest.

Keep in mind when it comes to cucumbers that letting grow to larger than normal sizes will produce one that has way too many seeds and won't be as crisp and tasty as their smaller counterparts. So follow the steps above to create the optimal growing environment and harvest early and often.
About the Author
Mike is the author of the book Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A Guide to Vegetable Gardening for the Rest of Us, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where ever gardening books are sold. For more tips on vegetable gardening, Mike can be reached at his website: AveragePersonGardening.com.