Complimentary Blueberry Juice

A couple years ago we tried these Japanese Shintokiwa cucumbers. I had heard of them, but someone from our CSA gave me one to try and it passed the bar for trial. And so trial we did. That was actually our first trial with cucumber trellising, knowing that we would be building a hoop house in 2025, to get some practice in. It wasn’t pretty. So to make my life easier, I chose to do only the Lisboa F-1 parthenocarpic greenhouse cucumbers at first. This went pretty well, we got huge yields, and aside from getting used to how the plants behave, it was sucessful.

This season for our second crack at hoop house growing, I opted to trial the Shintokiwa again, this time in the hoop house, I planted 20 at the end. Now, we have a 10-foot-high wall of insane cucumbers.

This is kind of wild!

At first when I was training and trellising the Lisboas, I attempted to train and trellis the Shintokiwa the same way, but quickly realized that these were not at all the same. There were lots of flowers, but little fruit, also the plants were half the size and speed of growth of the Lisboas. This is not surprising, as Shintokiwa being open pollinated, lacks the vigor and other qualities selected for in the more refined Lisboa F-1. As for the flowers, well the Shintokiwa require fertilization, and the Lisboa do not.

On the advice of local seed guru at Tiny Monster Garden, I stopped trimming or caring about these plants and just let them go on their own. The branching and wildness would aid in the pollination, and Ryan advised that they would branch heavily and set fruit later. And here we are, some 5 weeks after harvesting the first Lisboas, we are in for a massive wave of Shintokiwas…from just 20 plants.

I find it crazy how these things, without any human help at all, have reached the top of our trellis and by next week will be at 12 feet. They have grabbed onto the lines and each other, forming a sort of stable wall.

Here is a photo of the flower sets, almost all the flowers visible are male flowers. But now, we’re seeing a lot more female flowers and a lot more fruit. With this huge leaf mass that has also built up, I think these plants are going to be supercharged for quite awhile yet.

For contrast, here are the Lisboa cukes from a few weeks ago after their first hard low-growth pruning. These are all a single-leader vine, with flower/fruit sets at every leaf. On the way up I take every second one off to prevent aborted fruit, and to not tax the plants too much. When they hit the ceiling they come down the other side, branching out and “falling” down with the weight of the cucumbers in what is known as “umbrella” style trellising.

In future blog posts I’ll have to go into trellising the cherry tomatoes as well, which is its own learning curve. So far it’s more in the jungle style, hopefully by next year it will be more civilized, after I make enough mistakes to know what not to do.

Still, I can’t believe the yields. This is just one harvest from yesterday. We’ll be picking twice a week until probably some time in September.

I also can’t believe that we used to plant 400+ plants in the field. These 120 are out-yielding the 400+ by a wide margin.

Learning better techniques lets us grow more in a smaller area. There’s some up-front learning with the trellising and such, but the trade-off for speed of harvest for me is worth it.

Now that it’s raining today I’ll go try to tame the cherry tomato jungle. Wish me luck.

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice

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