How To Grow Cucumbers (From Seed To Harvest)

It might seem weird that many of us are obsessed with growing a plant that is 95% water. But I am, and by the end of this video, you will be too, because we're going to be growing cucumbers from seed to harvest. We've been growing cucumbers as human beings for over 3000 years. First in India, then China, somehow they made their way to Europe. No one really knows exactly how, but now of course they are all around the world. And fun fact, the phrase cool as a cucumber refers to the fact that if I was to slice open a cucumber on this table right now, So there's like a real origin story behind some of these phrases that we use all the time. And in fact, He was obsessed with growing cucumbers. It's believed that that mirror stone was mica, which is a reflective sort of sheet mineral. I actually collected as a kid in fact. Really cool that he was growing cucumbers in a makeshift greenhouse all the way back in the day. Pliny the Elder actually also referred to a specific recipe that frankly sounds kind of gross. But at the end of the video, we're going to grow these from seed all the way out to harvest and try Pliny's recipe. So follow along for that. But we need to talk about varieties cause we all grow cucumbers for different reasons. The most common one you'll probably grow is a slicing cucumber. So for me this is actually the first plant I ever grew in my life, which would be the Marketmore cucumber, a very classic variety. We also have poinsettia 76. These are just your slicers. They're going in a salad. You're probably peeling them. They're nice and crisp and crunchy. Then for me I love a pickle and you can grow them. You can grow homemade pickles. That's the actual name of the variety itself. They are a bit thicker peppers. The skin is thinner. There are less seeds. So when you pickle, you don't have to deal with eating all of those seeds. But to me, no summer garden is complete without a pickling cucumber. So I would recommend tossing at least one in the mix. Then you've got some kind of fun varieties. Tasty Green is a Japanese cucumber. These are the ones where if you've ever been to a Japanese market, you might see them actually wrapped in like a shrink wrap, which obviously grow it yourself. I'm not really big on wrapping one cucumber in a piece of plastic. Then you have some very weird ones like Lemon cucumber. It doesn't really even look like a cucumber. It grows in more of a spherical shape. It's not my favorite for flavor, but it is an easy one to grow. It is very prolific. Then you have things like gherkins, which are just small little cucumbers that you can just pickle and kind of put on a lox bagel or something like that. And then you just have types, right? So you have the vining style, which is going to climb up and kind of go over a trellis, which we'll talk about and a bushing style, which is great for a patio or a container grower. Usually we recommend to start cucumbers where you're going to grow them or direct sow them right where they'll be for the season. But I'll show you how to transplant them if you don't have the right climate to do that right now. Cause they do not like the cold. They ideally want 55 degrees Fahrenheit or more at night and certainly in the daytime to thrive and as well to germinate. So what I'll do here is I've got my market more cucumbers. I've got my little six cells. I like to just pop a quick hole down. The reason they don't generally want to be transplanted is because they just have a sensitive taproot. And we've done tests before and we've seen that whether you transplant or direct sow, they tend to kind of stabilize and catch up to one another, so to speak. So the direct sown ones just do completely fine. But two seeds per hole, about half to a quarter inch deep. Fill them up and cover this up. Then wet it, put it in a nice warm area. And eventually, maybe about 10, 14 days later, you'll have these right here. So I've got two per cell. And when I want to transplant, which I'm going to do right now, I can just pop this out and very gently do this. And so my entire root system is intact. I haven't really disturbed it at all. So let's talk about where to plant your cucumbers. So I'm in an area, my garden, in ground, but raised beds or even containers, 10 to 15 gallons would be perfect for growing cucumbers. What you really want though, generally, is some sort of trellis. So we have this little small A-frame trellis. It's a modular one. You can kind of like pop it apart and design different dimensions. But regardless, an A-frame is really nice because it'll climb up and then the cucumbers tend to fall on the inside, making it really easy to harvest them. So I have my Poinsett 76 transplants here. I'm going to transplant them on this side. I'll direct sow on the other side. The thing about cucumbers is they are what's called allelopathic, meaning that they actually do suppress growth of other plants around them. So my poor dahlias might have a little bit of a hard time, but just keep that in mind when you're planting them out. I'm going to space them about 12 inches apart, which means I'm going to do three per side here. So there's my three on transplant. That's why I like the six cells cause I'm not disturbing the taproot cause they don't like to be disturbed. And then over here, I'm going to direct sow. Much like I transplanted, but just over on this other side. I'm going to pop in. We're just going to see which one ends up growing a little bit faster or if they frankly grow the exact same. But the thing you need to know is if you're going to be planting them out, they like humid temperatures. They don't like to be absolutely scorching. So when you get to consistent 90 degree Fahrenheit or hotter, you actually might want to plant them in an area of your garden that gets part shade in that hottest time of the day. Cause they will start to wilt. Remember these are vining plants that produce a ton of leaves and tend to be very water heavy. So if they don't have enough water and it's too hot, you'll tend to find them wilt and they might die back a little bit. So I've got mine in on this side. I'll come back over and do a quick transplant. What I like to do is I use some sort of trowel tool and I just pull the soil aside, kind of like this, slot it in, try not to disturb it too much. And I like to give it a fair compress around, really seal it in there. I'll leave a couple. And what I'll see is it'll start to climb up over the course of this growing experiment. But if you are growing one of those bushing types, or maybe a vining rambler, you may want to space it out just a touch more. So like a viner that you're not going to trellis up, which is totally fine. You can do that if you want to. I would space them about three feet apart and kind of grow them closer to how you might grow like a melon or cantaloupe where you just kind of let it go across the ground. So I've got these in. I'll give them the healthy dose of water and we'll check in when they start to grow up the trellis and talk about what to do as your cucumbers develop. We're back. It's been a few weeks and the cucumbers have bushed up considerably. Now something that's been surprising to me, remember these were the transplanted cucumbers and those were direct sown in the ground over there. And I thought that they would catch up and surprisingly they haven't. So if you do want a headstart on your cucumbers, it does seem slightly advantageous to start and transplant them in. But I'm not mad with my direct sown cucumbers over there. So what you want to do at this point in time, definitely keep your watering on as second you start getting cucumbers throwing fruit out on the plant. So little baby cucumbers, you need to be watering as often as that plant needs it. And fortunately cucumbers are great because they will tell you when they need water. These are big old leaves and they'll start to wilt. Now in the middle of the day when it's really hot, if they start wilting, don't stress and think you need to give them water. That's more of a natural response by the plant. If you don't see those leaves start to pick back up as the temperatures cool, then you know it really is dry down there. So give that a nice little drink. But right now let's take a look at what's going on in the trellis. Something that I like to do with my cucumbers that I put a trellis on, I like to clear out some of the vines that aren't really going to make it to the trellis because I know I can get hit with powdery mildew and some other diseases and even pests that just make these a bit less productive. So I'm going to come through and do just a touch of cleanup under here, removing and simplifying the plant so that I get just a little bit more yield on the trellis that I actually want. So some of these that are flying out this way, I'm just going to prune them off a touch. This is not mandatory by the way, guys. But to me, I find it's, I just really like having my cucumbers go up the trellis. I want to harvest off the trellis. Another thing I really like to do if your cucumbers try as they might aren't actually making it up to the trellis is you can do a little manual threading at the start of their journey. So these are my direct sown ones, if you remember. And I've got this vine kind of going in, but this one, if I let it go, it's just going to keep going this way. So I just come in and tuck it and you can be kind of forceful. They're pretty resilient. And then I've got this guy, which just decided to go this way, right? I don't want that. I want it to come up through here. That's why I like these bigger openings because you can get a little bit of leeway here. All you really need is that plant to have one of these tendrils eventually attach. And then it kind of right sizes itself. It looks a little weird right now, but trust me, this will work out just fine. If you really want to get fancy and delicate, you can prune out some of these lower leaves and clear out some of this bottom here. But what's going to start happening is these are going to climb up and we're going to get some nice fruit setting or nice cucumber setting in the middle here and they're going to start falling down. And I'll actually show you, I've got a couple of cucumbers over here where that's already happening. So this plant is a bit further along and it's on our taller modular A-frame, which I actually kind of like for cucumbers because they really want to go up. So you've got some smaller fruit developing here, but the real secret is down below. Some really nice cucumbers right here that are pretty much at their point of harvest. But I just wanted to show you really quickly kind of the future of what our other plant is going to look like and some things you can do at this point in time. So I really get a lot of pleasure and joy out of kind of manually training some of the vines through, even at this stage. So I might toss this guy through and thread him up there. I see another one coming out over here that I'm actually just going to remove. And so this is kind of what you want to get to. And if you want, another way to grow cucumbers is even to have like an arched tunnel that you can build with cattle panel, grow it up both sides and they'll eventually start falling down right in the middle. So imagine if this was curved right here, you'd start to see them hanging just like this. And with cukes, they're so prolific. You can pickle them, you can eat them fresh. That to me, it's one of the more satisfying things to grow in a system like this. The day is finally here, my friends. Let's harvest some cucumbers. Really the eye is the way to know when a cucumber is ready to harvest. I've got my homemade pickle variety right here. And there's a couple of cool things you can do. Of course, you can just harvest the classic pickling cuke. This is about the right size here. So I've got a nice pickling cucumber. But if you want to get into that gherkin game, you can harvest them younger like this. Maybe one or two inches or so and harvest a ton of them. Harvest them often and then you can pickle them in that fashion. If you're looking at like a slicing cucumber, maybe six to nine inches or so. But really come out on the daily at this point because there's so much leaf matter. There's so much sort of energy being poured into these fruits that the more you harvest, the more you're going to get until these cucumbers start to die off. And when you store them in your fridge, to make them last the longest, throw them in a crisper drawer with the vent closed on high humidity. That's probably the best way to do it. If you store them sliced, then you want to store them in a airtight container. But for me, pickles are the way that I typically like to enjoy my cucumbers. And now it's time to try Pliny the Elder's OG cucumber recipe. Actually Jacques on the team found the recipe. So I figured why not bring you on to try it? So what we did is we peeled a cucumber, we sliced it into a centimeter sort of slices, cut that in half, and then we salted it for 20 minutes. Squeezed as much of the water out as we could, Jacques. It was a lot. It was a ton of water cause they're mostly water. And then what we did is we put three tablespoons of vinegar, three tablespoons of olive oil and one tablespoon of honey and just sauteed it for three minutes. So. It's like a hot pickle. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. Definitely hot. Here we go. It is very hot. Got a little of that juice. That's not bad though. It's kind of like a diluted pickle. Yeah. Bread and butter-esque, like a hot pickle bursting in your mouth. Not bad. Would I certify Pliny the Elder's recipe as epic? I'd probably say no, but it's on the cusp. It's not bad, especially if it's thousands of years ago. Guys, grow cucumbers from seed to harvest. We have a ton of varieties at botanicalinterests.com. Check it out. Other grow guides here. Good luck in the garden and keep on munching.