How to grow cucumbers

Cucumber is a fast-growing vine, and gardeners grow it for the gap between a fruit picked that morning and one shipped from a store: crisp flesh without the softness of storage. A single plant can climb a trellis instead of sprawling across open ground, which the Alabama Cooperative Extension System notes keeps fruit clean, reduces disease, and eases harvest in less bed space. Because the vines keep producing new flowers once they start, cucumber rewards checking the bed every day or two instead of once a week.

The hardest part of growing cucumber well is keeping up with the harvest. University of Georgia Cooperative Extension notes frequent picking is essential to fruit quality, and a delayed harvest reduces both fruit quality and the plant's future productivity, since letting cucumbers mature and swell on the vine signals it to stop setting new ones. A second-year gardener who skips a few days during a busy week, assuming small fruit can wait, returns to swollen, seedy cucumbers hidden under the leaves. Picking those oversized fruit does not undo the damage: the vine has shifted effort into maturing seed, and new flowers slow for the rest of the season.