How to Prune Cucumbers & Identify Suckers

hello to all my fellow farmers and gardeners out there welcome back to another Nature's always right episode today we're going to be pruning the Cucumbers um so I'll be showing you uh what the suckers look like how to take off the leaves that are dead and dying and just kind of how to analyze the Cucumber to keep it in the best health possible so for planting the Cucumbers you do remove suckers on cucumbers to increase production but when they're young like this they don't really have uh any sucker production yet but you can see them starting cucumbers also produce suckers in the crotch of the plant just like a tomato does once these grow bigger I'll show how to prune them and cucumbers they have a pretty similar structure to tomatoes but they are different but they are similar in the fact that they have suckers that also grow out of the crotch but they are easier to identify less tricky and I think a little bit more fun to train so let's take a look at this guy so once again we're going to start at the bottom bottom so here's all the the beginning of the plant that we've removed and as we come up you can see some different things going on here so these are the on a cucumber these are the sun leaves and at every node let me show you a real good node here so a node is a place where another branch is connected or a fruit so at this node we have all the structures here so let's identify the structures Okay so we've got main staff the main stem continues up this way we have our fruit right there's the Cucumber this is our sunleaf and this as you might have guessed is the sucker this is a part of the cucumber plant that will continue to grow and it has the ability to produce flowers and fruit but we are training to a single leader so we don't want to split our energy we want the energy to travel straight up the single stem and keep producing fruit so here's the beginning of a cucumber if you guys have never seen it they start it like that the flower opens and it is pollinated if it's not pollinated or there's bad pollination sometimes the fruit can rot and fall off some people confuse that with Blossom and rot oh and the other structure I didn't mention is the tendril that's the other thing you'll see at a node and the tendril of course reaches out to grab onto things to help support itself so here we've got all the structures we've got main stem tendril sunleaf fruit and a lot of the time on the Cucumbers you're removing suckers that um are small actually that little leaf right there coming out of the center that's a sucker what will become the sucker so you can actually remove that real carefully just kind of put your finger in there and rub it and then it'll pop off and now it's gone so isn't this a lot easier than the tomatoes so much easier to identify okay the sunleaf is always going to be gigantic the sucker as long as you're pruning them every week they're always going to be like small like this or a little bigger but sometimes you'll miss one and I'm going to show you that in a second okay we got main stem sunleaf fruit okay the only other leaf that isn't the sunleaf or the fruit it's going to be a sucker always okay and that's kind of a rule you can live by on the Cucumbers there's not weird stuff going on that happens so let me try to find a large sucker and so unfortunately I don't have an example of a super big long one um but here's an okay big one okay so let's look at the structure we got main stem we have a fruit and this fruit looks like I didn't might have not gotten pollinated it's starting to kind of rot a little bit okay then we've got sunleaf fruit tendril the only other Leaf is the sucker so the main difference right it's the sucker has just like on a tomato it's got a sunleaf and then the new leader growth point okay so that's going to be on it the sunleaf it's just the sunleaf it'll never have anything else on it it will always look like this the cucumbers are much more consistent to prune okay so let's pop that guy off here's another one so just to identify one more time sunleaf fruit main stem tendril there it is okay then the last step here I just want to show you guys is how I think about removing leaves on the cucumber and so a lot of times the Cucumber will put off its extra suckers lower on the branch stem here so go down and make sure that they're all gone sometimes it'll put them on the plant places that you've already removed them so go through the whole plant remove any dead or dying leaves um any leaves that are blocking sunlight um any leaves that are touching the ground any leaves that are touching other plants it's better just to remove them we just pruned these the other day so I don't really need to remove anything on these so here's a plant that I left to uh train to show you guys so here I'm going to remove a bunch of these leaves cuz they're not really helping too much they're not getting much sun and they're low to the ground they're blocking sunlight to my basil plant and there's a lot more forward growth on this plant as well so it's time we can just get rid of it so that's what I'm doing I'm just removing all the leaves up to the next set of fruit usually if there's any more dead or gross ones I'd get them out of there

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 920,277

Keywords: gardening, how to prune cucumbers on a trellis, how to prune cucumber plants, how to prune cucumber vines, how to prune cucumber, how to trim cucumber plants, how to grow cucumbers, how to care for cucumber plants, prune cucumbers, prune cucumber plants, pruning cucumbers, nature's always right, cucumber pruning, cucumber trimming, epic gardening, gardening for beginners, gardening tips, epic gardening cucumbers, epic gardening cucumber pruning, gardening advice

Id: XuhIpjKiKq4

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018