3rd August

Out in the field I am still amazed at our cucumber crop.

This was no trial, just a complete mistake, that no one is owning up to, me included.

All the squash plants and cucumber plants look the same as they are growing, it is so easy to mix the different varieties up, so we label each tray, each tray has twenty-eight cells, so eventually we get twenty-eight plants.

In the past we have had mix up and it is not very handy when harvesting.

But somehow, we managed to plant twenty-eight cucumbers at the start of the courgette rows.

At the start I though they looked like the small bon bon plant which are a trailing variety, but on further inspection, I could see they looked more like cucumbers.

Well, we have been harvesting one to two cucumbers daily of off these plants, and they have had zero maintenance.

In the tunnels the cucumbers need tied up weekly and side shoots cut of to help growth and produce a good crop, lots of work, but this year the cucumbers have not been that good, all I can put it down to is the intense heat they were sitting in for a while a few weeks ago.

The temperature gauge in the tunnel was stuck at 49 it doesn’t go any higher, so we don’t know how hot it really was.

Cucumbers don’t like the cold, but at the other end they cannot take that sort of heat, the plants look great and there are loads of flowers which eventually become a cucumber, but they are really slow, where out in the field the side shoots are the same length as the main head and they are trailing along the ground, zero maintenance and some days we are harvesting more from them, than from the two hundred and fifty we have in the tunnel.

This slow harvesting out of the tunnel is a new one for me.

So next year I am going to block one hundred extra cucumbers just for planting in the field,

This is a trial I would never have thought of doing, just because we live in Scotland and you couldn’t possibly grow cucumbers in an open field, but why not they are like courgettes and squash plants.

If some one had asked me about growing cucumbers in an open field in Scotland, I would have defiantly said that will never work, unless you plant them outside in a sheltered area that gets the sun, and they have to climb, they have to be in a tunnel, then I would have walked away tutting and shaking my head.

How wrong would I have been,

But I still think we were very lucky, and I am not sure if it will work.

Time will tell, Bananas next, ??