Some of you might be running into the same problem we have! Way, way too many cucumbers coming on all at once. We’re going to share our favorite way of dealing with it and also show how this problem manifests.
Cucumbers can be a super finicky veggie, even if you give them optimal growing conditions. Outside of disease, one of the most common problems is brought on by having too much fruit on the plant. Each cucumber sucks resources from the plant, requiring water and nutrients to sustain the large fruits.
When the plant has met its capacity, it will start to abort new fruit. You’ll often see the new fruits start to yellow up and shrivel. This is sometimes an indicator of disease, but it’s far more often caused by not enough resources and too much fruit on the plant.
In an ideal world, one would just harvest all the cucumbers. But, that can often cause the gardener issues as you may not be in a position where you want to put all those cuke’s up. In that case, it’s usually a better choice to keep them on the plant. At least this way, the cucumbers will retain their nutrients and won’t start to spoil. Fresh cucumber doesn’t last long, even in the fridge.
But, it’s really important to regularly harvest those cucumbers as quickly as you can to free up resources for the plant!
With cucumbers, it’s important to comb over every possible vine for any “rogue” cukes. One little cucumber outside of view can devastate your plant. It will get ginormous, not unlike a massive zucchini, and as mentioned above it will rob the plant (and remaining cucumbers) from all the resources.
Our most favorite way to burn through cucumbers is making up cucumber salads. Our recipe, which you’ll find down in the comments, uses up two pounds per batch. One salad feeds two people very comfortably and you could probably eek out a third with more “reasonable” portions. This salad is so ridiculously addictive and good that you’ll want a mountain of it on your plate! Plus, it’s super good for you and very low in calories, so there’s virtually no penalty for it. We’ll eat this salad practically every night!
We talked about it earlier this year, but we performed a major expansion of our cucumber crop this year. We think we might have gone a little too far. Where we usually will plant two cucumbers per bucket, I think in following seasons we’re going to back it down two one per bucket.
It’s also quite crazy how much water pressure this cucumber expansion put on our off-grid water supply. All cucurbits will use water at crazy rates if you allow them to, sometimes exceeding a gallon per container per day. We’ve been having to fill our reservoir at regular weekly intervals this year, whereas we could get away with weeks in between watering during the early part of the season in year’s past.
Even though we’re experiencing some growing pains, in a lot of ways, this is a good problem for us to have. In previous years, we haven’t had enough cukes to do all the things we want. So, if you’re trying to strike balance in your gardens, it’s important to know that it’s a common problem to have in gardens!
