When to Pick Cucumbers and Why They Come Out Curved

Seven to ten days from flower to fruit

From an open female flower to a picking sized cucumber is roughly seven to ten days at the height of the season, and less than a week once it is properly hot. Note the day a flower opens and you will not have to hunt for what is ready.

Pick in the morning. The fruit has taken up water overnight and is firm, so it is crisper and keeps better than fruit picked in the heat of the day. Cucumbers picked in the evening have already lost water and go limp by the next day.

A clothes peg clipped to the joint where a flower opened saves you hunting, and doubles as a record for working out timings next year.

Pick at the size that suits the use

Once the plant starts to flag, pick deliberately small. Taking less out of each fruit is itself the rescue.

Picking late is the biggest loss you can take

A cucumber puts on an inch or more a day. Walk past an eight inch fruit and by tomorrow it is over ten inches, the seeds are hardening and the flavor has gone. The bigger problem is that an oversized fruit monopolises the plant and the female flowers above it drop.

If you find one that got away, take it off without hesitation. It feels wasteful, but leaving that one costs you the next several. If you are going away for a few days, pick everything, including small fruit, before you go.

1. Take an oversized fruit off immediately One overgrown cucumber costs you several female flowers further up. Removing it is the profitable choice even if you throw it away.
2. Strip the plant before you go away Pick everything, including immature fruit, before a few days off. A plant carrying nothing recovers noticeably faster when you get back.
3. Cut, do not pull Cut the stalk above the fruit with clean pruners. Pulling tears the vine, and that wound is how gummy stem blight gets in.

Unless you are saving seed, an overgrown cucumber has no value left. It just keeps drawing on the plant for as long as you leave it.

What a misshapen fruit is telling you

Shape is the most useful diagnostic a cucumber gives you, because it reports on conditions from about a week ago. Read it and you can correct things before the next batch of fruit is affected.

1. Curved fruit Short of water or food, or not enough light because the leaves have closed over. Check whether foliage is lying across the fruit and increase the watering. A curved cucumber tastes exactly the same.
2. Fruit that tapers at the tip The classic sign of too little water and food. It also happens when the plant is carrying too many fruit at once, so reduce the number and feed.
3. Fruit that swells at the tip Poor pollination or waterlogging. One or two is nothing, but if it continues, look at how much you are watering and at the drainage.
4. Bitter fruit Heat, drought and an ageing plant together. The bitterness concentrates at the stem end, so cutting that end away generously usually leaves the fruit perfectly good.

Rescuing a tired plant

A plant that has cropped hard makes smaller leaves and thinner fruit. Most people give up at this point, but if you take a few fruit off to lighten the load, feed, water thoroughly and clear out the crowded old leaves, a good proportion of plants push out new growth within a fortnight.

Whether it is worth trying is decided by the growing tip. A thin tip that is still extending will recover. A tip that has stopped and yellowed, on a plant with a browning stem base, has a disease in it: pull it early and move on.

1. Take fruit off Remove several fruit, even small ones, to reduce the load. Cutting the demand comes first.
2. Clear the old leaves Remove yellowed and diseased leaves to let light in. A few every three days rather than all at once, or the stems and fruit scorch.
3. Feed and water Scatter fertilizer along the shoulder of the bed and water thoroughly. Not letting it dry out for the next fortnight decides whether new growth appears.

After a rescue, do not let it set heavily again. One fruit per side shoot will keep it going to the end of the season.

A second batch for late season picking

Cucumbers grow so fast that a sowing or planting in midsummer will be picking by late summer and into autumn. That second batch faces the hottest part of the year, so shading and a mulch to keep the root zone cool are not optional.

An autumn crop also starts in a garden where powdery and downy mildew are already established. Clear the first batch and its diseased leaves first, and site the new plants away from the old bed if you can, and you will avoid most of the early damage.

If you would rather not run a second batch, the rescue described above will usually keep the first one picking into early autumn. Which you choose depends on whether you want the ground for something else.