- 2 months ago
Pick cucumbers hard, small, and often, and your vines can keep producing far longer than most gardeners expect. The big secret here is simple but counterintuitive: never let a cucumber grow big and seedy on the vine, because one overripe fruit can slow the whole plant down. Elias shares old Lancaster County gardening wisdom on how to get nonstop cucumbers all season long with daily harvesting, smarter spacing, succession planting, and steady care.
The method is practical for garden beds, raised beds, containers, and trellised cucumber vines. You’ll hear why giving plants room makes picking easier, how planting a fresh batch every few weeks keeps young vines coming, and why pollination matters when flowers appear but tiny cucumbers shrivel and drop. The video also covers simple ways to help bees, reduce cucumber beetle damage, and feed vines with compost, manure, compost tea, and wood ash.
If you want more cucumbers for eating, pickling, or sharing, this gardening guide focuses on the real habits that keep harvests coming: pick early, pick often, plant in succession, and keep the garden alive for pollinators.
Great for viewers searching cucumber growing tips, vegetable gardening, trellis gardening, succession planting, pollination problems, cucumber beetle control, and how to get more cucumbers all season long.
The method is practical for garden beds, raised beds, containers, and trellised cucumber vines. You’ll hear why giving plants room makes picking easier, how planting a fresh batch every few weeks keeps young vines coming, and why pollination matters when flowers appear but tiny cucumbers shrivel and drop. The video also covers simple ways to help bees, reduce cucumber beetle damage, and feed vines with compost, manure, compost tea, and wood ash.
If you want more cucumbers for eating, pickling, or sharing, this gardening guide focuses on the real habits that keep harvests coming: pick early, pick often, plant in succession, and keep the garden alive for pollinators.
Great for viewers searching cucumber growing tips, vegetable gardening, trellis gardening, succession planting, pollination problems, cucumber beetle control, and how to get more cucumbers all season long.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Cucumbers are one of the easiest and one of the hardest things you will ever grow, all at once.
00:05Grow them right and you will have more cucumbers than you know what to do with.
00:10A glut, an avalanche, more than you can eat or pickle or give away.
00:15Grow them wrong and the vines quit on you by midsummer and give you a sad handful and then die.
00:22And here is the strange thing.
00:24The difference between the two is not luck and it is not some secret feed.
00:29It comes down mostly to one thing that will sound backwards when I say it.
00:34That to get endless cucumbers, you must pick them hard.
00:38Pick them small and near abuse the plant with picking.
00:43Today I will show you why your cucumber vines quit too soon and the old tricks to keep them pouring
00:49out cucumbers right up until the frost.
00:52I am Elias and I have grown cucumbers on this Lancaster County ground my whole life.
00:58For the pickling and the eating both.
01:00And I have learned their ways which are peculiar.
01:03For the cucumber is a plant in a great hurry.
01:06It lives fast and it dies fast.
01:09And once you understand that about it, everything else makes sense.
01:13So let me show you.
01:15Quick word before I go further.
01:17The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in any one video.
01:23I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:28The book is the long version.
01:30If you want it, it is there.
01:32I will not mention it again.
01:34My grandmother put up more pickles than any woman in the district.
01:38And I remember asking her as a boy how she grew so many cucumbers off so few vines.
01:44She laughed and said, Elias, the trick is to be greedy.
01:49Pick them before they are ready.
01:51Pick them every day.
01:52Never let one grow up.
01:54And the plant will kill itself trying to beat you.
01:58I did not understand it then.
02:00But I have proved it true every summer since.
02:03So let me hand you her greedy little secret and the rest along with it.
02:08The first trick is the great one, the one that sounds backwards, and it is this.
02:13Pick your cucumbers hard and often and small, and never, ever let one grow big and ripe on
02:22the vine.
02:23Let me tell you why, for once you understand it, you will never forget it.
02:28A cucumber vine, like every plant, is trying to do one thing above all, to make seed, to
02:35make the next generation, and once it feels it has done that, it figures its work is finished
02:41and it can quit.
02:42Now a cucumber grows astonishingly fast, faster than near anything in the garden.
02:48It will go from a fine little cucumber to a great bloated baseball bat of a thing, near
02:54overnight.
02:55You can watch it grow.
02:57And when a cucumber is let grow big and fat and yellow and full of hard, mature seed, that
03:04vine says to itself, there, I have made my seed, my work is done, and it slows right down or
03:11quits producing altogether.
03:14One big, ripe, seedy cucumber left on the vine can near shut the whole plant down.
03:21But here is the beautiful part, that this works the other way, too, and you can use it.
03:26If instead you go along and pick every cucumber small, young, before it can ever make mature
03:33seed, and you pick them hard, all of them, every day, the vine gets frantic.
03:39It thinks, something keeps taking all my fruit, I have not made a single good seed yet, I must
03:46make more, more, more.
03:48And so it pours out cucumbers like a thing possessed, trying and trying to finally make
03:54that seed you never let it make.
03:57So you exploit its own hurry against it.
04:01Pick early, pick often, pick small, pick every single one you can find, and be near ruthless
04:08about it, and the vine will produce beyond all reason.
04:12Miss one, let it fatten and yellow, and you undo the whole thing.
04:18So go through your vines every single day, hunt high and low, for they hide under the
04:24leaves, and pick, pick, pick.
04:27That daily ruthless picking is the whole secret of endless cucumbers.
04:32And that leads right into the second trick, which is to give your cucumbers room, and plant
04:38them where you can get at them.
04:39For that daily hunting and picking only works if you can actually reach and see the cucumbers.
04:45And here is where folk defeat themselves.
04:47They jam their cucumbers into a crowded jungle, packed in among the tomatoes and everything
04:53else, all tangled together, and then they cannot get in there to find and pick the fruit.
04:59It is hot and cramped and nightmarish to search, and so they miss cucumbers, and the missed ones
05:05fatten and yellow and kill the vine.
05:08So plant your cucumbers with room around them, and give them a good trellis or fence to climb
05:14up, up off the ground, where you can see and reach every cucumber easy.
05:20A cucumber grown up a trellis, out in the open, where you can walk the row and spot every
05:25fruit, is a cucumber you will actually pick in time.
05:30Crowding is the enemy, both because you cannot pick well, and because crowded, damp vines take
05:36disease.
05:37Give them room, and give them something to climb, and you make that daily picking possible.
05:43Now, the third trick answers the big question, which is, how do you keep cucumbers coming
05:49all season, when the vines quit on you by mid-summer, no matter what?
05:54And the answer is a hard truth you must simply accept, that cucumber vines are short-lived,
06:01and there is no keeping one going all season.
06:04They live fast, and die hard.
06:07A cucumber comes up in but a few days, is ready to set out in two or three weeks, and
06:13starts giving fruit a month after that.
06:16It is all hurry.
06:17And a plant in that much of a hurry, burns itself out fast.
06:22It will not last more than a couple months, no matter what you do.
06:26On top of that, they are prone to the powdery mildew that whitens and kills the leaves, and
06:32to the cucumber beetles that carry a wilt disease from vine to vine.
06:37So one way or another, by disease, or by beetle, or just by burning out, every cucumber vine
06:44is going to sicken and decline by late summer.
06:48Trying to nurse the same tired old vines along all season is a losing battle.
06:54So do not fight it.
06:56Instead, do what the old market gardeners did, and plant in succession.
07:01That means you start a fresh little batch of cucumber seed every three or four weeks,
07:07in a new spot, all season long.
07:10So while your first planting is giving its glut, your second is already coming up behind it,
07:16and when the first sickens and quits, the second is just coming into bearing to take
07:22its place, and a third is on its way behind that.
07:25You keep a steady relay of young, vigorous vines always coming on, and so you have cucumbers
07:32pouring in from June clear to the frost, even though no single vine lasts but a couple months.
07:39Always be starting the next batch.
07:42That is how you truly get endless cucumbers.
07:46Not by keeping one vine alive, but by always having a young one coming on.
07:51And here is a bit of old wisdom that goes right along with the succession.
07:56Keep a little open ground always ready.
08:00The old gardeners never planted every inch at once and then had nowhere to put the next
08:05planting.
08:06They kept some ground open, a bed or a corner, always ready to take the next round of seed,
08:13tucking young cucumbers in wherever a spot opened up, even among the flowers, even against the
08:20house wall in a bit of dumped compost.
08:23So leave yourself some open ground and keep filling it with young vines through the season.
08:29Now the fourth matter is the pollination, for a cucumber must be pollinated to set its fruit,
08:35and knowing how it works helps you when it goes wrong.
08:39Most cucumbers make two kinds of flowers on the same vine, male flowers and female flowers.
08:46The male flower is just a flower on a little stem.
08:50The female flower you can tell easy, for it has a tiny little baby cucumber right behind
08:57the bloom at its base.
08:59And for that little cucumber to grow, the pollen must get from a male flower to a female flower,
09:05and it is the bees and the pollinators that carry it.
09:08So here is the practical wisdom.
09:10That if your vines are flowering well, but the little cucumbers shrivel and drop instead
09:16of growing, you likely have a pollination problem.
09:19Not enough bees are visiting to move the pollen.
09:22And the answer is our old friend, the living garden.
09:26For the same flowers and diversity that bring the good hunting bugs, bring the bees too.
09:32Grow flowers among and about your garden, do not go spraying poisons that kill the bees,
09:39and keep the place alive and humming, and your cucumbers will be well pollinated and set heavy.
09:45And in a pinch, if you have too few bees, you can play the bee yourself, taking a little brush
09:52or even a picked male flower and dabbing its pollen into the center of the female flowers,
09:57flowers, and set the fruit by your own hand.
10:01But far better to keep the garden alive so the bees do it for you.
10:05And choose a good, productive kind of cucumber to begin with, one known to bear well in your
10:11area, and you start ahead.
10:14Now a word on the cucumber beetle, since I mentioned it, for it is the cucumber's great
10:19enemy and worth handling right.
10:22These little striped or spotted beetles chew the plants, but the real harm is that they
10:27carry a wilt disease from plant to plant that can kill a vine outright.
10:32So you want to keep them off, especially off the young plants.
10:36The old plain ways work best.
10:39When the plants are young and tender, you can cover them with a light cloth or netting to
10:45keep the beetles off entirely.
10:47Only you must take that cover off once the plants flower, so the bees can get in to pollinate.
10:53You can hand-pick the beetles of a cool morning when they are sluggish, dropping them in a
10:59can of water.
11:00A dusting of plain clay or wood ash on the leaves puts them off some.
11:05And above all, keep your vines young and vigorous with the succession planting.
11:11For a strong young vine shrugs off what would kill a weak old one.
11:16And when a vine gets badly hit, you pull it and its disease out and let the next young
11:23planting carry on.
11:24I will give the beetles and the other cucumber pests their own full telling another time,
11:30for there is more to say.
11:32Now the fifth trick, and it stands to reason once you think how hard these vines are working,
11:38is to feed them well and feed them steady.
11:41A cucumber vine pouring out that avalanche of fruit is working itself to the bone, and
11:48all that fruit has to be built from something, so it draws hard on the soil and empties it
11:53fast.
11:54So you must keep feeding it, and keep feeding it steady.
11:58For here is the thing, a plant fed steady and even produces steady and even, while a
12:05plant starved for weeks and then suddenly gorged does poorly, stopping and starting.
12:11Plants are like us that way.
12:13They do best on regular meals, not famine and feast.
12:18So feed your cucumbers regular, every couple weeks through the season, and feed them the
12:24old, honest way, not from a bottle.
12:26Work good compost and old-aged manure into the bed before you plant.
12:33That is the foundation.
12:35Then through the season, a feeding of compost, or better yet, a compost tea or a manure tea,
12:42which is just compost or old manure steeped in a barrel of water till it makes a rich brown
12:48brew poured around the roots, gives them a quick, gentle feeding they can drink up right
12:54away.
12:55And a bit of wood ash worked in gives the potash that feeds the fruiting.
13:01Feed them steady and honest like that, and they will feed you steady in return.
13:07Now let me say a small plain word, not a who-profits sermon, for the cucumber is no one's scheme.
13:14But notice, the whole secret of endless cucumbers cost you nothing bought.
13:20It was picking them hard and small, giving them room, planting a fresh batch in succession,
13:27keeping the garden alive for the bees, and feeding them steady from the compost and the manure.
13:33Not a product among them, all just the old knowing of how the plant works and a bit of steady
13:40care.
13:41There is a whole trade in selling folks miracle cucumber feeds and special seeds and sprays,
13:48and here the real secret was free, mostly in the picking.
13:52So folk come to think, a poor cucumber crop wants some bought fix, when it mostly wants
13:58a body who picks every day and starts a new vine in time.
14:03But now you know the cucumber's hurried nature, and you can turn it to your own great harvest.
14:08So there are the tricks for endless cucumbers.
14:12Pick them hard and small and daily, and never let one go ripe, so the frantic vine keeps producing.
14:19Give them room and a trellis, so you can reach every one.
14:23Plant a fresh batch in succession every few weeks, for no vine lasts long, and always keep
14:30young ones coming on.
14:32Keep the garden alive for the bees to pollinate them, and keep the beetles off the young plants.
14:38And feed them steady and honest from the compost and the manure.
14:42Do these, and you will have more cucumbers than you know what to do with, an avalanche of them,
14:49right up to the frost.
14:50Now I want to hear from you.
14:52Tell me down below whether you knew this picking secret, that overpicking makes them produce more,
14:59for it surprises near everyone.
15:01And tell me your county, and what you do with your cucumber glut, the pickling, or the eating,
15:07or the giving away, for I always run out of ideas by August myself.
15:12I read every one.
15:14Next time, I want to show you the keeping of the cucumber beetles and the other pests off your vines
15:21in full, the old, plain ways to guard your cucumbers and squash and melons from the bugs that would kill
15:28them, without a shelf of poisons.
15:30The old people understood the plants they grew, their natures and their hurries and their needs,
15:36and worked with those rather than against them, and so grew abundance by knowing rather than by buying.
15:44There is a quiet wisdom in understanding a thing well enough to turn even its rush to die
15:50into a great and lasting harvest.
15:53The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.