Growing Pickles

Besides growing great looking flowers, I also like to grow a nice and easy vegetable garden. One of my favorite vegetables to grow is pickles, pickling cucumbers that is. Today, we’re visiting my home garden. I like to share tips to make gardening easier, and I’ve got a good one here that’s sure to help. Because of back issues, I don’t want cucumber plants sprawling all over the ground. So I’m growing my pickling cucumbers on a trellis with hardware cloth. This makes working with the plants very easy. This year I’m growing Burpee Pickler, Ferry-Morse Garden Bush Pickle and Burpee Picklebush. I train the cucumbers to grow up on the trellis, letting the tendrils coil unto the hardware cloth. Sometimes I’ve helped the vine hang on using these greenhouse tomato clips. And if you know me, you’ll know that I like growing lots of plants, including these pickling cucumbers, in EarthBoxes. Being a cucurbit, the pickling cucumber plants are monoiecious, which means they have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Pollinators, in this case bumblebees and honeybees, take care of transferring the pollen. I’ve got 36 plants growing this year and that’s a lot of cucumbers. I might have over done it just a little bit. After harvest the pickling cucumbers, they of course, become pickles. Yum! I’m horticulturist Gary Bachman and I hope to see you next time on Southern Gardening.