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  • From: Andy Fellenz <artisanfarms AT gmail.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] pruning cukes--pro and con
  • Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:33:08 -0400

Richard,

It really depends upon your space available, labor utilization and marketing goals as to whether it is worthwhile. For your plain jane American cukes like Marketmore, Straight 8 and General Lee It is a lot cheaper to grow cukes in the field and sell the good ones while culling the rest.  For the designer cukes with expensive seed the straight economics start to move towards High Tunnel production. 

In my case, I don't have the space for extensive plantings, want early cukes, prefer to keep my small crew busy  when it is too wet to work in the field rather than sending them home, want to rotate crops in my high tunnels all of which have led me to trellising and high tunnel production.  Last year, I end up with very few culls with the trellised cukes (almost every cuke is straight and uniformly colored) and picked several hundred pounds a week from ~320 row ft. for 9-13 weeks. Additionally, after the third week of picking no bending is required to get the cukes as they are well off the ground. 

I grow the cukes from May thru at least Labor Day and sometimes go until the 2nd week of September when the plants are pulled and the house is either put into a cover crop or a round of late fall/early winter greens.  I start harvesting before the end of June.  Last year I spent a little over $700 on labor for trellising and pruning and yielded several thousand pounds of cucumbers from ~1,000 square feet of a high tunnel. 

Andy



On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 8:06 PM, Richard Stewart <rstewart AT zoomtown.com> wrote:
Andy

Can you give us hard numbers?  Plant to pound production or row foot to pound production?

I simply do row beds and mulch with straw.  I plant four to eight successive plantings and do zero maintenance other than harvest and cull dead plants.  I am curious if the return if worth the effort in your type of growing.

Thanks for any additional details.

Richard Stewart
Carriage House Farm
North Bend, Ohio

An Ohio Century Farm Est. 1855


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