Hello and welcome to Gardening with Ben. You'll go to a podcast for all
things green and growing. I'm Ben, your allotment guide and here to help
you cultivate your garden and your passion for plants. Whether you're a seasoned gardener
or just starting out, this podcast is for you. Each episode will dig
into tips, tricks, and techniques to make your garden and allotment thrive from
planting, sewing, and growing. We will share all the tips and add
advice. We will also have regular episodes talking about what we have been up
to on the a lotment. So sit back, grab a brew and enjoy
today's episode. Hello, and welcome back to Gardening with Ben for another new
episode this week. We've had quite a few new episodes popping out, so
I hope you're managing to keep up with them all. Yesterday we were talking
all about mental health in the garden and the allotment, and hopefully I'm going
to be doing a video on that as well soon on my YouTube channel.
If you've not checked out all my latest videos, there is lots more new
videos popping up on my YouTube channel. And thank you to all those who
have subscribed to it and been watching my videos. It has really helped.
We are pushing for it to get to the stage of monetization this year,
so all the views, all the subscribers really does help push it out there,
so thank you for that. But yeah, hopefully we'll get lots more
videos coming. If you've got any ideas of videos that you want on there,
just drop me a message on Instagram. I'm always up for new ideas
and yeah, I love sharing tips and advice from down there. We'll also
be doing another tour video coming up this week down at the allotment. I'm
good to be doing them on a weekly basis as obviously things are growing now
on the but we'll trying to with this weather. But hopefully we'll get lots
more growing down there, and we've got quite a lot more to be getting
planted. And that leads on to one of our subjects of today. We're
going to be talking about growing cucumbers. Yes, cucumbers. Now, cucumbers
are expensive obviously to buy in the shops, and I've always done well with
growing cucumbers down at my allotment, and the variety that I usually grow is
the market more variety of cucumber as it seems one of the easier ones to
grow regarding pollination, getting them started and training them and growing lots and lots
of food on them. So I've been growing market more variety for about sixteen
years now, and I've never had any issues growing them. Sometimes you obviously
get nibbled when they get started on, but after that usually they get growing
pretty well. And I tend to grow these in my polytorol, and yeah,
it's can get kind of hot in there and humid, but I do
have a good success rate with them all. And all I do with my
cucumbers is I just grown in a bucket with some holes in the bottom,
and I just purchased some regular compost from the supermarket or from the garden center
DIY shop, and I fill it about three thirds full of compost and I
plant one in each bucket. Now, these buckets I usually get from someone
like Morrison's, the flower buckets, and they usually do the job pretty well.
And we've had these flower buckets for years now. All we do is
wash them out each year and reuse them and make the use of them down
in the allotment. So we've got about five cucumber plants growing down at the
allotment at the moment, and these are ones who are all potted up in
the buckets, all ready for growing this year. And we've also planted about
two to three weeks to go fifty more seeds from a packet and they've all
germinated, so we need to start getting those planted up into the buckets as
well, So that might be a job for this week, but we'll see.
We'll see how well they're looking when I'm next down at the allotment.
But yeah, I want to get as many cucumber plants growing as possible this
year, as they always go down well with myself, they always keep well,
and I love sharing them out with friends and family as well, and
I usually have a good reception from people when they've tasted them, tasted how
delicious and how sweet they are. So cucumbers are pretty easy to look after
obviously, Like I say, I grow man in a potannel so our water
mine every couple of days as they big drinkers. Obviously, cucumbers are made
up of a lot of water, mainly water, so they do require quite
a bit of drinking water and keeping them hydrated, and obviously I like water
in the morning and some times spray them just to keep them nice and moist
with water, and I usually do pretty well with them. So once we
start get growing and get to a certain height, what you need to do
is you need to make sure that you get them growing up something. You
don't want cucumbers growing along the floor as things can eat them. They can
get rotten, they can get eaten bye wraps, mice, slugs, anything
will have a nibble on it. So you need to make sure you're growing
them up off of the ground. Now, what I usually do is I
usually grow them up from netting, and cucumbers are very strong plants. What
they do is they send out little I've forgotten what the word is now,
like little shoots where they will grab onto something. Tendrills a bit like I
think they're called. They lash onto things and wrap the cells around them.
So if you've got netting or they'll throw out these tendrils and they'll wrap themselves
down the netting and they'll hold themselves tight. They won't need fastening up.
You'll need to get them started by tying them onto the netting. But once
they're growing up the netting, they'll grow pretty easy and they'll do pretty well,
And it's funny with growing cucumbers. What I always have the issue of
doing is that I'm growing them all and then like you suddenly any cucumbers and
you look and there's one hiding to say how big they grow. You can
literally be looking somewhere and you just suddenly find a cucumber hiding somewhere and you're
like, wow, where did that come from? And it can be massive.
But I always do well with my cucumbers. And what I also do
is I put some chicken pellets in the soil as well, so that it
breaks down over two to three months and gives it continuous food right through up
until it fruiting. And also I give them a feed weekly until the flowers
and the fruit start appearing. And then once the flowers and the fruit start
appearing, then I'll feed them probably twice a week because the more they're growing
the plants, the more food they'll need, the more energy they'll need in
growing those cucumber plants. Now, depending on how many cucumbers you want growing
on it, sometimes if it's got quite a few growing on it already,
you can take the flowers off what haven't developed so that it concentrates on the
cucumbers that are growing, or if you want a continuous crop, I sometimes
just leave them on. Once one cucumber is ready, then another one will
start growing on the flowers. And obviously if you're growing them in a greenhouse
or polytunnel, you'll need to make sure you leave your doors open so that
the bees can get in there and pollinate the flowers, so that they do
pollinate and you do get some cucumbers on them. If not, you can
just go around with a paintbrush and tickle each flower and that will help pollinate
the flowers and hopefully produce some more delicious cucumbers. So yeah, they are
pretty easy to grow cucumbers. If you've never tried growing them before, I
do advise to go out and get some. You will have a good success
with them. Market more variety are a brilliant variety to grow. Now you
possibly have chance to plant some if you've not planted some, because they'll grow
up until October. But you're best off probably having a look in at a
garden center or something like that seeing if you can find some cheap ones to
stick in. But I do advise giving cucumbers a try. Let me know.
If you're going to try some cucumbers, send me a message on Instagram.
I always like to hear people's feedback from the episode, and yeah,
I'm going to be sharing lots of tips and advice on my cucumbers and photos
of them as well. Wants to start growing, so that's going to be
our next job, potting up fifty cucumber plants, which is going to be
fun. And yeah, I'll do a video as well or it all fastened
up with them on the new and everything like that in the polytunnel, So
make sure you stay tuned for that. So until next time, remember keep
smiling, keep shining, and keep gardening with Ben. Everyone, thank you
for joining me on this episode of Gardening with Ben. I hope you have
found some useful tips and integration for your own gardening and a lotment journey.
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