I never knew to prune my cucumbers?! 🥒

good morning friends welcome to my Farmstead dreams I'm Diane and today I wanted to work on my cucumbers so I'll show you how big they gotten so this is the bed where the cucumbers are and as you can see those are the ones in the back and then these are the ones in the front and I fed them last weekend and oh my goodness they have just shot up and you might think oh my goodness they're so beautiful and bushy and gorgeous and they are however last year I got powdery mey really bad on my cucumbers they didn't produce really well um and then they died early which cucumbers tend to In the Heat of the summer they don't really like the heat but um I did not realize that I needed to actually prune my cucumbers um for best production and best growth and and then those cucumbers back there in the back that trellis is a little bit higher than this one in the front I don't know if you can tell but the bottom of it is about right there and so I'm going to tie some juk string and Twine those cucumbers up around it so I can get them off the ground and CU if you get them off the ground they have better air flow and um I can train them up the trellis so that's what we're going to work on today and so I've done some research and we'll just get started and I'll share that research with you okay so from the research that I've done the purpose of pruning a cucumber is to give it better air flow um it also promotes growth and helps to prevent pests and disease and it makes harvesting easier so I thought I would try it this year and see if that will help me in um in growing better cucumber plants uh which in turn will produce better cucumbers so um basically if you leave your cucumbers laying on the ground the pathogens live in the soil and when you water the Cucumbers those pathogens Splash up and they get on your cucumber plants um and so if you Prim them like I say it helps give them better air flow the surface of the leaves dry faster and I think that's what's going to help me with um the powdery mildew you know preventing that powdery mildew um and so I think that that's going to benefit me and help me to have better cucumber plants this year also if you prune your your cucumbers it tells your plants where to send the energy to and so it doesn't spend its energy in places that are not going to be productive and it also um will spend its energy growing Leaf foliage instead of growing cucumbers and we want cucumbers not leaves not that we don't need leaves but you know what I'm saying we want more cucumbers than we do leaves so the first thing I want to do is I want to I want to get my my cucumbers up to the trellis so that they they start climbing it so I'm going to use um some juk twine I have some here and I'm going to just kind of tie some some some of these pieces up to the trellis just to just to train them to start rining upwards instead of growing out like this okay so the pruning process from what I understand and from what I've researched um you have different parts of the Cucumber I'll show you okay so here we have the main stem this is the main stem here hopefully you can see that okay and then you have um some people call this a sunleaf some people call it a branch then you're going to have a tendril which this one doesn't have a tendril but you know what I'm saying it's going to have a tendril then you're going to have the fruit and this one actually has two fruits and then it's going to have this here which is called a sucker hopefully you can see that little piece there so it's basically just like tomatoes you know you want to get rid of the suckers because the reason they call them a sucker is because they suck the life out of the plant or they suck the life out of the fruit more importantly so you want to have you know good fruits you want to have good healthy fruits and you want to have a multitude of fruits so if you get rid of the suckers then it helps to tell the Cucumber where it needs to focus its energy and it helps it to grow better it helps it to grow stronger and it helps it to produce more fruit okay enough chitchatting let's um let's just get started what I'm first going to do is um tie them up and get them tied up to the trellis on both this trellis and the back trellis and then we'll come back and we will we'll do some pruning [Music] this [Music] okay so I have tied the juk twine to the bottom of my trellis and then I tied it down at the bottom of my plant hopefully you can see that it's right down there just tied Loosely at the bottom of the plant and then I just kind of wrapped the vine around the twine as you can see here all the way up just to train the Cucumber to grow up and that way it will grow to the trellis um and I did the same thing with this one hopefully you can see the twine there and I've just kind of wrapped it around the Cucumber Vine so that's how I um how I tied them up to train them to go up the trellis so let's get the pruning okay I apologize for having to do a voice over but apparently my mic did not connect to the video when when I started the video so I do apologize but I'm getting ready to prune the cucumber plants and I guess here I'm just running my mouth I'm sure I'm talking about pruning them far enough up from the ground or the soil to prevent water from splashing up so generally I like to prune my plants between 12 and 18 in um to give it 12 and 18 inches between the soil and the bottom leaves so that's what I generally do when I do my pruning so um and if you see my trellis is it's about 12 it's between 12 and 18 inches from the soil so I'm going to prune up to the bottom of the trellis but I want to make sure that I leave enough of the foliage so that it doesn't kill the plant because you don't want to kill your plant by pruning too much I'm really sorry about having my hand in front of the camera for so much I do apologize for that here I'm showing you that I didn't realize that I had two plants that were um planted so closely together when I planted my cucumbers from seed I usually plant multiple plants in a little cup and then what I did with these is I just put them directly into the ground when they were kind of small and kind of forgot about them honestly sorry about my finger um but I went ahead and just left them once I saw them like that because um that's part of the aggressive planting that I'm doing in the gardening in the garden this year and they seem to be doing very well so I'm going to Le them and I'm just going to prune them heavily and get them vined on the trellis um kind of giving them a little room between each other on the trellis and I think they'll do fine even though they're planted so closely together in the soil so far it doesn't seem to be bothering them so I'm just going to leave them and see where we go with it or see how we How We Do with It here I'm just trying to make sure that the cucumber plants have a good hold on the trellis so that they will continue to grow up and not fall and lay on the ground here I'm just showing you a close-up view of how I'm pruning the branches and I'm sorry my hand gets in the way a lot I will try to do better there's a sucker and I'm going to pull it and then make sure it's all out and there's a little tendril that just bounced just so you know what a tendril is they are really pretty when they're bushy like this but they do need the air flow so I'm going to go ahead and prune everything and I'll come back and show you what it looks like at the end and oh my goodness it looks like I have murdered my cucumber plants look at all of the debris I'll definitely have to do some clean up I will not leave that in the garden but this is going to make for much healthier plants it's going to ensure that we have better production of fruit uh fruits on the plants and then we can make more pickles so just kind of giving you a a view of what they look like in the end they're not as pretty because they're not as bushy but they are healthier or will be healthier plants because I've given them some room to breathe I did notice as well that I do have several other ones who have like two plants planted really closely together but I'm leaving those two and here is a view of the back trellis that I twined up to the trellis and went ahead and pruned those too and they're on the end of the left you can see the sugar snap peas which are delicious and there are some cucumbers in the back row I kind of planted two rows really closely together um so that I could pack more plants into a small space um but they all seem to be doing really really well and I'm happy with the way it's going so far so hopefully this video gave you some help um maybe you can get your cucumbers pruned and allow them to breathe and maybe it will help you to grow some big beautiful healthy cucumber plants that give you lots and lots of fruits so I just want to say thank you so much for watching please don't forget to like the video And subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos like this you can also tap that notification Bell so that you can be notified when I upload more videos like this so I'm going to go ahead and end the video here and I hope that you have a wonderful beautiful day I hope you enjoy some time in your garden today and I will just see you in the next video Happy gardening big hug [Music]

Channel: Farmstead Dream

Views: 7,211

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Id: ZQF2Z6UhBPs

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024