Hi!
This is a space to share growing observations and your gardening season with cucumbers. The GTS mix for 2026 includes pickling types and slicers and fun surprises like lemon cucumbers. Plant and grow them all together to encourage multiple crossing. Cucumbers can be direct sown or started in trays. Let some of the fruits mature to produce seed and save seed for the next growing season. Search and research for new varieties that can grow in your garden.
On March 29th I sowed the Canadian cucumber mix (along with some suyo long cucumbers and marketmore seeds that ive had for a couple years) in a covered tray outdoors and the germination is beautiful! Ive attempted to grow cucumbers twice before this but they were always eaten when the fresh sweet little leaves emerged after direct sowing them outdoors. This year i am very hopeful and confident that i will finally get fresh tasty cucumbers! Im intrigued by growing a type of cucumber that will do well for pickling at a young stage but also great as a crispy slicer cucumber for fresh eating. I think i will grow some plants with a trellis and others sprawling across the ground as they please
Transplanted cucumber plants wherever i could fit em on April 18th… slowly watching the nicest lookin ones disappear from rats and slug pressure 
In my experience south of you here in Seattle, that’s about 3-4 weeks early for cuke transplants. If the soil isn’t warm enough, they just sit there without growing much and are quite vulnerable. That said, it’s just about the perfect time for direct seeding now if you have more seed to fill in the gaps.
I find that the general guidance about when to plant relative to last frost date doesn’t translate well for many warm weather crops in our maritime climate where both soil and nighttime temperatures stay cool late into the spring even after the threat of frost.
The survivors from your early planting will hopefully contribute genetics that are more tolerant, but sometimes those super early plants just get stunted and never really thrive.
Huh, shucks. I have definitely noticed stunted growth but i was wondering if it was just my clay soil. Tricky trying to find the fine line when pushing the threshold for gardening timing. In the past i tend to play it super safe and would end up planting everything late but now that im learning about adaptive gardening ive been planting super early to see what happens haha. I appreciate you sharing your experience and i will be mindful of that next year 
perhaps i should be growing normally this year and let the genetics figure out the soil/weather a bit, then save lots of seed so i can mess around more in the years to come… That wouldve been a smarter plan!
I have cucumbers around half of my play pyramid. They are a mix of seeds I saved (last year I grew some from southern exposure seed exchange, a grex from near me in east tennessee by kevin bane from efn, and i think maybe gts cucumber) and this year added seeds from a local friend (!!!) who is doing adaptation gardening and we both had cucumber seeds to trade. I tried sowing marigold seeds I saved with the cucumbers but the marigold germination was poor. Maybe I need to grex some marigolds haha.
That cucumber teepee looks awesome! Was debating trying out a setup like that for tomatoes or cucumbers… perhaps i will next year. Your cukes are lookin good n green so far 
Also, i think a marigold grex would be brilliant!
The cucumbers at our community garden always end up really struggling, either from powdery mildew or just general environmental stress. I got some seeds from GTS so hopefully at least some of these will survive! Some of them are getting their first true leaves now.
Starting cucumbers in 2" soil blocks seems to have gone quite well. I planted them out a couple of days ago. I’m debating whether I want to give them some sort of trellis or just let them trail. The climate is very dry here so I’m not as concerned about moisture-related diseases as I was in Texas, but also keeping them off the ground will help with harvesting and keeping them away from pests. On the other hand being lazy sounds good right about now
I think they are a little yellow because they were running out of nutrients in their soil blocks, so hopefully they will be happier how that they can stretch out and get some more.
So relieved to see my cucumbers bouncing back after what seemed like eons of stagnant lack of growth. And now.. flowers n lil fruits forming! Yay!
Woohoo!! Just ate my first ever homegrown cucumber. Two fruits on one plant so the bigger one was left on the vine for seed, second one for my tastebuds to enjoy. So rewarding and relieving after my concerns over transplanting too early in the season this year. Huzzah 
Whoops, I meant to post some more updates but didn’t.
The cucumbers have grown quite a bit since that last picture.
We picked a few last week after I realized we had them. I had been peeking and hasn’t seen any but then noticed a big one I had missed.
The lemon cucumber and the skinny ones (looks like Persian and English) were ok. The other small ones were all bitter and inedible. The other two are still in the fridge and may be past their prime by now.
This weekend we went out and picked all the cucumbers that were ready and kept track of which plant each one was from.
The ones we have tried so far have been much better than that first batch, so it seems like those first ones were just the result of a hot spell making them bitter.
If any of them are consistently bitter we will just pull the plant.
Haaah oh no! What an excellent reminder! I totally forgot to share updates as well but have also been harvesting plenty of cucumbers for the past couple weeks.
Just picked about 8 or so yesterday but didn’t focus too much on a quality test. So far I’ve only had one bitter cucumber that I noticed. Dehydrating salt and vinegar cucumber slices, made some lacto-fermented pickles and some tzatziki along with a Greek salad.. I am becoming lightly intimidated with the amount of cucumbers I was unprepared for, which is an excellent situation to be in! I’m pretty frazzled and my cucumbers are not trellised so it is easy to miss some and lost track of which fruit came from which plant but I will try to start tasting and tracking a bit better… Maybe. Lol. Might go full savage and just take a bite of each cucumber as I pick it so I know exactly which plant might have a bitter tendency 
So far I really love the little lemon cucumbers, the English cucumbers are pretty standard, and I was pleasantly surprised by the flavour of the thick pickle lookin cukes! Maybe I’m just easy to please but so far I’ve only had one noticeably unfavourable cucumber. Woohoo!
