- Get (hybrid) resistant varieties.
Weather vagaries, attack by pests and diseases are one of the most destructive hinderance to cucumber production.
Growing resistant varieties will get you half-way through.
2. Plant varieties with more female flowers and that are prolific.
The end goal of growing cucumber is for fruits. The more the number of fruits the better.
It’s female flowers that become fruits when fertilised. You want to plant variety that not only produces more female flowers than males flowers, but that produces them more often and with high chances of fertilisation -by self-pollination.
Cucumber flowers have short lifespan, they wilt away when not fertilised.
A prolific variety will produce flowers often and you have to step in to ensure pollination -either by hand-pollination or facilitating the presence of pollinators.
3. Grow when relative humidity is appropriate
Pollen viability is as important as pollen production. If plants don’t produce pollens, fertilisation doesn’t occur but so also when pollens aren’t viable (potent to fertilise the ovary).
Relative humidity affects pollen viability. Too low, pollens dry out. Too high, pollens stick together.
In both cases, pollen ability to fertilise is impaired. Moderate to relative humidity is best for cucumber (60 to >80%).
But hybrid varieties can adapt to (some degree of) changes in relative humidity and it’s better to grow them rather.
4. Make sunlight your ally
Fruit crops are sun-loving. Sunlight energy aids sugar and biomolecules production channeled into fruits. For heavy feeders as cucumbers the process must be constant.
But sunlight also aids transportation of water and nutrients into fruits and to places in plants where they are required for growth and repair functions.
5. Keep to GAPs
Even if you planted resistant varieties you must still keep to GAPs -remember the varieties will only get you half-way through.
Appropriate ventilation must be maintained. Heatstroke from vegetation and cramped space is a problem for cucumber and it births diseases.
You want to ensure adequate spacing that prevents cramping, competition for inputs among plant stands, and breeding of pests and diseases.
6. Moderate water -not little, not in excess.
Too little water will put the plants in survival mode and on acute state lead to wilting, damage to plant organs – many times irreversible -and impacts yield.
Too wet condition could breed root diseases and foster condition for pests and diseases to thrive.
Rather keep to adequate and timely irrigation in drips than excessive watering.
7. Trellise and early,
Trellis allows for cucumber (soon as it’s producing tendrils) to grow quickly and put on vegetation by enabling the plant reach up into the sky setting leaves intercepting sunlight and making foods.
It also aids ventilation promoting setting and arrangement of leaves in different rotation allowing for air circulation and preventing heatstroke and diseases.
Trellising provides support for fruits to grow fully & straight, enabling plant hold firm to bear fruits & and for the fruits to develop fully.
8. Irrigate at the base.
Humid conditions encourage disease build up as disease-causing microbes tend to colonise water droplets formed on leaves and become virulent.
Irrigating at the base helps with this and also ensures water is delivered to needed region.
9. Stick to nutrition recommendation
N,P, K are the basic essential nutrients needed by plants for proper growth and development. But their functions differ and need throughout plant’s lifecycle differ.
One would not want to be supplying nutrient that enables vegetation when plant is fruiting. This is waste.
Of course leaves manufacture foods that are supplied into the fruits.
However, at this stage no need for making new leaves but maintenance of old leaves, reason nitrogen is still required but in lower dose, but now more of phosphorus (for flower initiation and pollen viability), and potassium (enabling translocation of nutrients and manufactured foods).
10. Control diseases by controlling pests
Many times diseases affecting crops are carried by pests. Aphids feed on leaves & secrets honeydew then to be colonised by fungi causing downy mildew.
Most farmers are reactive than proactive when seeking to control diseases.
Tending to address downy mildew when they should aphids.
This may not be the same for other diseases but the message is still the same -to be proactive.
Most diseases don’t just emerge out the blue -they have carriers, precursors.