Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi All , I have just been out to the greenhose to fetch a cucumber for a friend only to find most of the small cucs have shrivelled up ,thet are planted in a ring and each week I feed them along with the toms with tomato feed ,they are Telegraph F1 does any one know why this should happen .
Thanks
Bitzy

Not pollinated? Have you removed all the male flowers?

Thankyou I had read somewhere that leaving on the male flowers would send the cucs bitter so I have removed them ,but thinking about it now that doesnt really make full sense ,so yes i have been removing the male flowers as they appear .should i have left them on ?

Hi Bitzy

I thought someone else might have come in on this one and said I was talking rubbish. The general advice on Telegraph has always been to remove male flowers to prevent bitterness after pollination. I used to grow Telegraph and allow pollination and never experienced bitterness, until about eight years ago when all the fruits were inedibly bitter. That's when I stopped growing them. I now only grow an open-pollinated variety, which I need to have pollinated as I am also growing them to produce 100+ packets of seed each year. Also we rather prefer "seedy" cucumbers - they are never bitter.

Thanks Alan ,I think I will try the same next year what type do you grow and are the seeds freely available ?
This is my second year growing so I still have a few more mistakes to make

Hi Bitzy

I grow Tamra. It's the fourth down on this page

http://www.realseeds.co.uk/cucumbers.html

It's not "all-female" as suggested, but does have few male flowers, hence the difficulty in producing seed. It never turns bitter.

If you would like some seed from last year's crop to try next summer, PM me with your address and some will come to you in the post.

Alan

Hi Alan thanks for the link I have been looking through what is available from the cataloge it looks ace ,I know where I will be getting my seed from next year.
Bitzy

In my experience, the plant will only support a certain number of cucumbers (2 or so) filling out at once, and the small ones will often abort until the larger cucumbers have been removed. Or maybe I'm just not watering and feeding enough ?

My cucumber was growing really well and is now quite large, but started with mottled leaves some weeks ago, though is still producing fruit. The fruit is now starting to look pale along the bottom of the fruit, they are still forming into quite a good sized fruit but looking blotchy, I cant decide what to do with the plant, should I get rid of it or should I carry on and let it keep forming the fruits which are not too bad tasting. I have got five other burpless tasty green cucumbers coming on, but I am worried about cucumber mosaic virus and I cant decide it I have got it (my cucumber not me)

Bitzy, thats where i get a lot of my seeds from, you can save seed from theirs, saves buying every year. I grew an italian variety of cucumber this year though, marketer, i think they were called, both male and female flowers, no bitterness, trouble free and vigorous tall plants, producing a steady flow of nice big cucumbers, quite seedy when they get big, so I will probably save seed from the best plant.