I plan to get a little reckless with my cucumbers next season.
I live on 66 North (same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska) in Sweden. The common assumption and wisdom here is that cucumbers can’t be grown so far up here, except in a greenhouse. I’ll once again challenge that assumption with a very wide mix. So far my mix is just an interbreeding population of some 12 varieties, but recently, I got a bit out of line and sourced some more stuff. I got a bunch of never, or almost never bitter, Asiatic types with netted, brown skins and blonde or yellowish slicing cukes. I alsogot a bunch of Nordic types. I’m bathing in cuke seeds. There’s no way back, it’s going to happen.
No greenhouse, that is! I think the seeds are bracing for impact already. They sure have plenty of time to prepare mentally.
In the past, I did such mass growouts with favas, tall peas, and lately, Phaseolus bush beans. Even the Phaseolus worked beautifully - in fact, I was floored! It’s great fun and something always comes out of it 
My plan is to grow the Asiatics in one patch, for now, and the Nordic types in another, somewhat separate, but nearby.
Another common myth I heard constantly is that you can’t grow cukes exposed to strong wind… that I demolished this year as I forced some cukes on trellis. I grow in a very windy area, fully exposed to both W- and N-wind, near a river, without any protection like trees. They did totally OK.
I didn’t try to resist the most destructive wind direction (W), I just put the trellises up W-E so it would blow right through the rows. When it’s wind from the west it’s very humid and often gale force, but not too cold so I let it be. On the other hand, the N-wind brings often cold air masses from the Arctic, too, so some of that I’ll try to block out next year with some tall peas or similar first, instead of letting the cukes fight it out like this last year. Anyway, so I can report that as long as the trellis is built sturdy, the cukes had no problem whatsoever resisting the wind. Plants were stocky, for sure 
Some 2023 pix because no post is complete without colorful pix 
Baby cukes. Climb, babies, climb!
Teen cukes
A favorite unknown white something, saved seeds separately from this guy
Some lucky ones that could sprawl instead
Ratty looking end-of-season cukes – pic taken the last day they were still alive
Last pick before hard frost, some of it gave seeds, others got pickled. None were explicitly bitter, which impressed me.
Getting mature seed here is not trivial. Not all seeds are well filled-out. But we’ve had the shittiest “summer” in 40 years they say. The whole July and August were just ruined. It was unseasonally cool and it rained on most days, basically eight weeks straight, including several 50mm+ (2") events overnight. We got drowned, there was standing water everywhere for weeks (thankfully, the cukes grew in raised beds), so I can only do better than this next year!
2 days ago
S̶w̶e̶e̶t̶ Tangy memories and the last jar I still have (fermented, not pickled!)
