Variety Feature: Cucumbers

Much of the following is an excerpt from our vegetable variety pages that can be found here on our website.  Editorial comment and material for the 2014 growing season are new.


The cucumbers are finally getting going and you may have noticed a spineless cucumber among the options.  Well, here it is!

Green Finger

That's a nice batch of Green Finger cukes!

We introduced this open pollinated "European style" cucumber to our farm in 2013 and were extremely pleased. These produce long cucumbers that stay thin despite reaching lengths up to 15 inches. Taste tests by our CSA members brought raves and the production numbers were very good. We suspect they will do better now that we know what to expect since we left a lot of cucumbers on the vine when we couldn't keep up with them. They look like they'll trellis well in a high tunnel and may help us produce early cucumbers in 2014.

The skin is less tough than the "American style" cucumbers (such as Marketmore). As a result, they show blemishes easily and get dinged up if you hit the edge of the container. Critters breach the skin more easily, so you will lose a higher percentage to small problems than you will with the other varieties we grow. On the other hand, the production volume is high enough to handle it. We expect we will refine our judgement further over the next couple of years. As with all varieties, you have to learn how best to handle them to get the best production levels.

2014 Season report thus far for Green Finger cucumbers:

Clearly, Green Finger (and all cucumbers) dislike the presence of Canadian Thistle.  But, this isn't too surprising.  The farmers dislike the presence of Canadian Thistle as well.  The slow start for the first succession of cucumbers hit the Green Fingers harder than most.  On the other hand, they are performing as expected for the second succession.  We will try to get these picked a little more often to prevent them from getting so large.  We also hope this will extend production.

You might note that we suggested they would do well in the high tunnel.  Well, we still suspect this is the truth.  But, we made some decisions about high tunnel space that omitted cucumbers from the space this season.  Whether this was good or bad is a moot point, but we do intend on giving them their chance in the future.