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  • From: "Glen Eco Farm" <glenecofarm AT planetcomm.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Cucumber trellises that work?
  • Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:13:48 -0500

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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