Home-grown cucumbers are unbeatably fresh and crunchy, perfect for adding to summer salads

Home-grown cucumbers are unbeatably fresh and crunchy, perfect for adding to summer salads.

Cucumbers are tender climbing or scrambling plants, for growing in a greenhouse or a warm sunny site outdoors, either up supports or trailing on the ground. With enough warmth and plenty of moisture, they’ll produce lots of tasty, crunchy, refreshing cucumbers from mid-summer onwards. When trained up supports, they take up little ground space, so can be grown successfully in compact gardens, patio containers or small greenhouses.
Cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) are closely related to courgettes, squashes and pumpkins, and are grown in a similar way to their fellow cucurbits, so if you’ve had success with these, you should find cucumbers straightforward too.
There are many cucumber varieties to choose from, varying in fruit size, flavour and disease resistance. Small or mini cucumber varieties produce lots of fruits, which are ready to harvest more quickly than longer ones. There are also varieties with tiny fruits (gherkins) for pickling. There are indoor varieties for growing in greenhouses, polytunnels or large coldframes, and outdoor varieties (or ridge cucumbers) for growing in a sunny, sheltered spot. Greenhouse varieties crop for a longer season, from mid-summer through to early autumn. Outdoor varieties are weather dependent, starting to fruit later and finishing earlier, but should still produce a good crop in warm conditions.