Lean and lower with cucumbers?
 

Since I have been using the single stem lean and lower method with my tomatoes and I tried it with a few fall cucumbers and it worked well so I had the brilliant idea of doing it with my full cucumber bed this year. It worked for a while and my cukes still look great but Oh My! did I underestimate the work that would be involved in the spring and early summer. Cucumbers seem to grow a foot or more a day and send out suckers like a weed and I just can't keep up. I like the results but not this much work. Next year I will do the same thing but with plants spaced much further apart and far fewer plants in a bed.

Gotta get out there and pick my pickling cucumbers and my Sweet Success since I missed yesterday.:panic:

Bill

That method seems like a lot of work no mattter the crop. I must be pretty lazy in my old age. But then I do tie tomatoes to a central stake until they get big enough to be supported by the concrete reinforced wire cages. Then I just let them grow.

My wife does our cucumbers and plants them in a large raised bed made from a cattle watering tub six feet across. I put a stock fence around about a third of the tub and another across from it and the cucumbers climb the fence. No tying needed. Cukes are harvested from the fence line.

The lean and lower method for tomatoes works much better for me with our humid conditions and abundant disease problems and the fruit size is usually noticeably bigger with very little drop in production. However the cucumbers were much harder to deal with due to their rapid growth and sucker abundance and it became a total mess. I removed our pickling varieties and now only have to deal with a few Sweet Success and despite the heat I still am producing more than can be used by the two of us.

Bill

Hi, yes, you are right, fewer cucumber plants and spread apart is the key with this method. It also helps to have a taller trellis height.

I tried it first time last year in my raingutter-bucket setup, with four, 5-gallon buckets in a row. As a result my trellis is a bit short, and the narrow diameter of the buckets puts things way too close. I couldn't keep up with the growth and suckers, they ended up climbing all along the top, tangled up into a leafy mess and then powdery mildew hit them within a month of production :( My relative humidity is high around 70-75% in the summer given that I'm coastal, but water saturation in the air will not be as much as yours since our temps stay a bit lower for most of the season.

This year we're concentrating on tomatoes, but I think we will try this in the ground in 2024 season and will keep the plants far apart. The lower/lean trellises are short at only 5ft, but it's by design for my aging parents to be able to reach.

My Sweet Success are still producing but in this near 100 degree heat they are starting that summer doldrums look with more curled fruit with weird shapes and they are not as tasty as earlier. Now that I am down to only six plants it is much easier to keep up with them and I may try a limited planting of no more than four plants this fall and space them about four or five feet apart and see how they do. That is my plan for the spring next year if possible.

Bill

Guess it is a good problem to have, when something works too well. I still can't picture the lean and lower, I mean I've seen video, I just can't picture using it here, outside, on tomatoes.

In this Heat, my Cucumbers are doing great by letting some grow up-forward around some of my Heirloom Tomatoes. But the Corn in between different Varieties did Ok, but provided some with too much Shade. But with this Heat; it is a "good problem" to have. Amen!!