How to Grow Cucumbers in Containers (Mini Munch Guide)

So what's one of the best-selling vegetables you can grow in a container in the UK right now? It is of course the Cucumber Mini Munch F1 and I have it here and we're going to go through a few things today to help you kick this off and get the very best out of these seeds. First of all we've got our compost and it's just a normal multi-purpose compost but what I've done I've filled this container and it's a fairly deep one and it holds a lot of moisture and we'll get on to that just a bit later on but I've sipped some fine compost on the top and we'll get into a packet straight away no messing around here. Now these seeds they are quite expensive well you get less seeds for your money on this one but the plants go a very very long way and this is perfect for container gardening and it's what exactly we're going to do on this as well. We've got five seeds here and we're going to start it off in this little tray but it will be transplanted on to a big one like this. So what we need to do first and here's a little bit of pro tip for you the seeds are quite big and we want to plant them on their side now there's only five we put the seeds on the side and it just stops this water getting this tray getting waterlogged and the seeds rotting out so we've got to treat these like gold so there's six cells on this tray and five seeds so place them gently on the side and then what I like to do is sieve straight over the top and that'll do and then all we need to do is get ourselves a label pop it in and give it a soak in you can water from the bottom if you want but make sure it's all the way through and then put this somewhere nice and warm now these will need a warm windowsill this time of year the best or the optimal germination temperature for these is anything plus 20 degrees so a lovely self-facing windowsill will do if you haven't got it maybe a heated propagator but these will germinate fine in around 7 to 14 days and then we're off to the races sort of care guidance on these as well as they break through get them into the light because as we all know light is fair food and they'll just get bigger and bigger the more light we give them after three or four weeks if you're not seeing good leaf growth you can feed them with a liquid seaweed now this will just boost the leafy green part and when they start flowering switch it to a tomato feed to a high in potassium feed now like I said when this gets going and established we're going to do small garden container pots so a lot of you who haven't got allotments or greenhouses we can just put them in a tub and I've gone for a tub from our local hardware shop and this one is a 26 litre tub and this will give it enough moisture and enough compost I'm going to put organic matter into the bottom then multi-purpose compost and let this run away with itself I'm going to keep the holes to a minimum on this bucket as well because I don't want it drying out if a cucumber dries out too much the taste of the fruit was is actually very bitter so keep it moist and with this sort of tub we can control the growing environment so it doesn't matter if you've got no room the cucumber mini munch is your is the one you should be choosing it can grow upwards up to two meters so we'll need a trellis on this as well so we'll set some sort of trellis up for it to climb up and we'll prune as we go so if it gets a bit out of control we'll just snip it off and prune it but we can follow the journey along together so I'll get these kicked off and started hopefully before you and as I grow I can give you updates on what I'm doing with the mini munch cucumber so like I said just a few holes in here to let it drain out slowly to retain that moisture but not keep it waterlogged and these will be happy as anything and why have I chosen the mini munch well basically it's because the skin is very very thin you pick them at around 10 11 centimeters so very small ideal for packed lunches like I said a very thin skin so you eat them like snacks they are the ideal snack and this variety is prolific so hopefully it's going to give us loads of fun along this journey now most people miss this when it comes to problems or literally one of the biggest problems you get with cucumbers and that's watering if you do water it inconsistently then you may run into problems so keep the watering regime nice and consistent that's why it's in the tub we can put it by the house and we've got we're good to go keep the watering very consistent and it'll be good as gold it's only when you over water it or underwater it stresses the plant out and then we get issues so let's have no stress on this plant and let it perform the way it should and give us that beautiful harvest and we'll see on the next video