Owens Corning

National Gardening Association Cool Cucumbers

By Warren Schultz

If you're on schedule, your seed orders arrived long ago; your garden is all planned, and maybe mostly planted. But hold on a minute. If you like cucumbers and have the least little bit of space left, you owe it to yourself to try the new Beit Alpha (or Middle Eastern) variety, Saria. Don't let the high price of the seed put you off ($3.60 for a package that will give you eight plants). These cucumbers are worth every penny. Pardon the unabashed (and unsolicitited) endorsement, but this variety represents a giant step for cukedom. The skin is smooth and shiny. The flesh is white and crisp. The seeds, if there are any at all, are thin, opaque and fleshy. And the taste! Absolutley, positively never bitter. It's sweet. It's cool. There's almost a hint of watermelon to it. I dare say you could slip this cucumber into a fruit salad.

Hurry and you can still experience the sweetness of Saria this season. Because the plants are not quite as vigorous as many American hybrids you will want to baby them a little bit. It's best to grow them for a couple of weeks indoors so that they have a good start.

While you're waiting for your seed to arrive, try to find some Jiffy-7s. These compressed peat disks, which expand when watered, make perfect cucumber cradles. Sow two or three seeds per pot, cover with vermiculite and mist them gently with water. The plants should begin to pop up within a few days. After two weeks under lights or in a sunny window, they'll be ready for transplanting outside.

Once they're out of the house I treat them pretty much like any other cucumber. Cukes need good fertile soil, room to roam, either hortizontally or vertically, and protection from their dreaded enemy, the cucke beeetle (of either the striped or spotted persuasion). For a 3' x 20' bed I spread a bushel of aged manure or a quart of dried poultry manure before planting. After about a month, when the rampant vine growth begins to slow, I scratch some more dried poultry manure (about a handfull per plant) into the soil or drench them with fish emulsion every three weeks.

Cucumbers can be allowed to spread along the ground, but they will happily climb just about anything, and be more disease-free as a result. I've found that tomato cages of concrete- reinforcing wire work even better for cukes.

A two-foot-diameter cage provides enough growing room for three hills of cukes spaced equidistant around its perimeter. I make sure to plant the cukes inside the cage so that I can cover the entire structure with a floating row cover, fastened securely to the ground. This air- and-water-permeable barrier provides the best protection when the nefarious cuke beetles arrrive. And make no mistake about it, they will arrive. If given free passage, they can make a small, tender cucumber seedling disappear in a matter of hours. Larger plants, which may survive tattered but unbowed, are easy prey for the bacterial wilt disease that the beetle often transmits. Rotenone or pyrethrum will knock the beetles for a loop, but I've learned the hard way that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Two years ago the beetles desended on my tiny cucumber plants en masse. It gave me the opportunity to use a spray bottle of a new encapsilated pyrethrm product that someone had sent me. As I aimed and fired, the insecticide came fizzing out in a thick foam, like shaving cream, that coated the plants. Two days later they were all dead. From now on I'll stick to nonchemical control.

Row cover barriers are perfect for Saria because the plants are parthenocarpic -- they set fruit without pollination. So you don't even have to remove the barrier unless the plants get overheated.

If you grow County Fair 87, my former favorite, you won't have to bother with any beetle protection. I still grow County Fair 87 as my main-crop cucumber. Technically a pickler, the four-inch fruit is also perfect for slicing. The yield is prolific -- fast enough to make a huge crop even in northern New England --the fruit and the foliage are never bitter. Not planning to eat the foliage? Maybe not, but the neighborhood cucumber beetles are. It's the bitter cucurbitacen that attracts beetles to cucmber plants. So no cucurbitacen, no bettles. No pesticides, no row covers, no problems.

Like County Fair, Saria is meant to be picked small. I harvest the fruits when they reach four to five inches. I don't bother to peel them. Most of the time they never even make it into the kitchen at our house. Our kids make the Saria patch their first stop when they're scouting for a snack.

Provided by NGA Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.

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