[Market-farming] Cucumber trellises that work?

Glen Eco Farm glenecofarm at planetcomm.net
Tue Jan 29 17:13:48 EST 2008


I have never had any real success with getting cucumber vines to climb 
vertical trellises.  I generally allow cucumber vines to sprawl and they 
usually do OK with the exception that a lot get missed by my PYO customers. 
If I could get them off the ground I think I could recover some of these 
losses.  These same customers also want Armenian cucumbers, not really a 
cucumber but more related to muskmelons.  Like muskmelons their vines are 
more susceptible to trampling damage than cucumbers and that is another good 
reason to get them off the ground.  I know that some people grow cucumbers 
on woven wire fences and that might be the way I have to go.  I have around 
20 cattle panels that I have always had tied up other years with sugar snap 
peas and (or) asparagus beans at the same time I need to be growing 
cucumbers.  I think I am going to devote them more to the cucumbers this 
coming year.  I'm thinking of setting them up in a V formatiom with the row 
planted in the bottom of the V and that should work.  The down side is the 
amount of cattle panels I would tie up per section of row.  I would like to 
find a way to get them to climb satisfactorily on a single row of cattle 
panels. Would leaning the panels over the row work?  What about directional 
orientation of the rows in relation to the sun track across the sky? 
Assuming that the row is oriented in the same direction as the sun track, 
roughly east to west, should the trellis lean towards the sun or away from 
the sun?
I would be interested in any one elses ideas or experiences with this sort 
of thing.  Are there any blogs out there?  I like pictures.  I have a good 
picture of my bean trellising system on my blog www.gleneco.blogspot.com . 
It is similar to the one pictured on the front pages of Seed Savers Exchange 
catalog.  It works well for beans and is relatively inexpensive, but it 
doesn't work for cucumbers.

Marlin Burkholder
Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, zone 6





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