Twiddling and Pruning Mini Cucumbers

Kyra showing us Picowell (mini cucumber).

Picowell, a variety of mini cucumber, is one of the main plants we grow at 248x52 greenhouse.  The planting to cutting cycle is about 3 month, where harvesting starts about 2 weeks after the planting.  We buy a seedling planted in a block, which is roughly 2-3 weeks old.  So we are actually harvesting after 4-5 weeks counting from the seeding.

It is very important to prune and twiddle the plant as it grows.  Pruning the suckers will prevent plants branching out.  We use the term suckers to refer to the head that is not on the top.  It is easy to distinguish a sucker from a leaf or a cucumber as you can see from the picture below.

Orange - sucker
Teal - leaf
Blue - cucumber

An image of a head.  We can see strings growing out to the
left and right.

Head is basically the sucker on top of the plant, and we want this because it grows upward.  It is helpful to note that whenever we see a leaf, there is also a cucumber and a sucker.  They are sort of like a triplet that germinate at the same point.  In the picture above, you can see that the sucker (orange), the cucumber (blue), and the leaf (teal) germinate from the same point.

We also need to snap off the strings because they catch on other plants and create a mess.  By "strings" we mean the vines growing out from the plant that tries to tangle on to other objects.  We may also refer to the white string to twiddle the plant as a "string," so be aware of the distinction.

That being said, twiddling a stem around a string keeps the plant in control.  We consistently twiddle it clockwise to prevent it from being untangled (i.e. if someone does it counterclockwise).  The following is the image showing how to twiddle.

Use one hand to pull down the string
and the other to twiddle.

A string nicely twiddled behind the string (the plant string,
not the white string) to prevent damaging the cucumber.

We do pruning and twiddling about three times a week.  However, the minis at 248x52 grow slow because we are not heating the greenhouse at night.  So we only do this twice a week.