Cutting Leaves Off

Cutting the leaves off for Kasja, a variety of long English is pretty much the same task as doing so for minis.  Today, we cut the leaves off to about my chest height so that we could continue to lower the plants.  We lower the plants to allocate more space for the heads to grow.  But the long English plants are already old (roughly 3 months) and are not producing as much as when they were young.  Also, stem rot disease is spreading and more than 15 plants are withered.

That being said, I doubt the effectiveness of today's operation.  According to Kyra, we want plant energy to concentrate on top and therefore trim off excess parts from the plants up to certain height.  But leaves are the producer of the energy, and to trim them off means to cut short the energy supply.  In order to verify the sanity of this action, I would have to investigate further.

Trimmed naked up to chest height.

As we trim, we also look for crooked, molded, and any defective cucumbers to get rid of.  We also get rid of other junks like suckers at the root.