After bragging about my armenians half the trellis just wilted withered is 2 days . Did you have the cuc beetles? ( yellow and black )

Who can figure an armenian? A year ago at my old house I cleared out some bermuda grass along a chainlink fence and haphazardly planted some armenian seed right in the grass
roots. By summer they were hanging all over it. My son and I ate them soaked in vinegar with onions til were sick of them and started to give them away. These 3 plants were growing in the worst dirt imaginable along with the bermuda grass. When I moved to a new place with much better looking soil I figured they would really get crackin'. This year mine have been growing since april and I have picked just one and there are 2 small ones on 5 plants now. Go figure!

i know this is bad to admit but i'm kind of glad, i really just could not take them anymore.

LOL. I'm not sick of them yet, but I'm no longer jealous yours started producing weeks before mine. And I'm not sorry I only have 3 plants.

My soil is not great, not bad. Raised beds. This is the first year I've had good cuc production, and most of them were bitter. So I'm not someone to give advice. I'm just waiting for you to discover the worlds biggest armenian that has been hiding in the vines all this time....

Tracy,

I have pondered your cucumber dilemma for a couple of days now, and I'm not sure I have an answer yet, but think I am closing in on one. To arrive completely at what I think might be 'the' answer, I need answers to a couple of questions that have been rolling around inside my brain.

With the cucumbers, are you growing varieties recommended for Arizona? If so, what specific varieties have you tried which have failed to give you cucumbers? When do you plant them and what are the daytime and nighttime temps once the plants are up and growing? Finally, do you have bee/pollinator issues there? I realize the main issue seems to be a lack of female flowers, and that would be separate from the issue of female flowers being pollinated, but a lack of pollinators still might play a role.

Dawn

Hi Dawn. I've tried a bunch of heirloom varieties,actually about 6-7 varieties. I planted last fall in September, which may have been a little late, and again this spring, in March, and again in April, at the recommended planting dates for Phoenix. I need to plant this next week, which is the recommended fall planting date. I'm getting my dirt improved in one of my gardens, should be done next week. I'd be happy to order a different variety, if you think there is a variety that might work well. I can add as much supplemental water with a soaker hose as I need, plus, I get cheap flood irrigation every two weeks.
I haven't ever seen any recommended varieties for the area, although I know a lot of people in this area seem to grow the Armenian cucumber. In the past two weeks, my Armenians have revived a little and produced about four cucumbers, from four vines, with more moderate, monsoon season temperatures.
I'm pretty sure that pollination hasn't been a problem as I frequently see bees working the blossoms and never have to hand pollinate my squash.
I recently purchased some new seeds from Pinetree. I purchased every hybrid pickling variety they had, plus National Pickling, Diva and Beit Alpha.
What I'd really like is a huge batch of cucumbers so that I could make pickles. Lots and lots of pickles. Plus, a decent amount of fresh eating, which I'm happy with the Armenian, if it would just give me more!
Thanks for pondering this problem. It's my biggest garden bugaboo. Oh, that and green beans. But, at least I can get long beans to grow and we love the long beans steamed, just like green beans. I may even try pickling them!
Heck, right now, I'd be happy if I could get more than three okra pods a day so I could make a batch of okra pickles, which are some of my favorite pickles!

Tracy,

The cucumber I have found most reliable in terms of disease and pest tolerance is County Fair. Many years it is the only variety that steadily produces a heavy load of cukes once we're having the hotter summer weather. It was doing really well this year until I got so busy with fires and so disgusted with the incredibly high water bill that I just stopped watering the garden and let it die...and die it promptly did, or at least most of it promptly died. Pest and disease tolerance are important because plants struggling with pest or disease issues often don't have the energy to produce well. So, since County Fair was producing here in high temps in the 105-112 degree range and had no pest or disease issues, I think it might produce well there for you. Lemon Cucumber is another variety that's always produces well here even in the hottest years, and so have Boston Pickling and National Pickling as long as I don't put them in the ground too early in spring. One reason that variety selection is important in terms of productivity is that parthenocarpic varieties tend to produce lower yields per plant sometimes so if you were planting only parthenocarpic varieties, that could be the problem. For me, County Fair is the exception to that rule because I think it is supposed to be parthenocarpic (but it is gynoecious and not monoecious, so that likely helps) and it will be seedless if it is the only cucumber variety grown within the pollinators' flight range, but it produces very well.

My best guess on your cucumber issues is that it is some sort of stress. Cucumbers respond to stress by remaining unproductive. There are many forms of stress, and sometimes plants are stressed by conditions that we think don't bother them.

One form of stress is tightly compacted soil. The roots of a healthy cucumber plant in good soil can spread out as far as the vines themselves spread and can go 2 to 3 feet deep, often growing 2 to 3" a day. If your soil quality or moisture levels do not allow for those roots to grow at that rate, your plants can be significantly less productive than they otherwise would be. They also can show other symptoms relating back to the tight, dense soil or low nutrition levels, including slow growth of the plants themselves, poor resistance to pests and diseases, very low yields and cukes that are very slow to enlarge and mature once they form.

Another form of stress is cool temperatures. Plants that are exposed to soil temps and air temps that are lower than those they prefer often will produce poorly, if at all, throughout their entire life. Seeds that are sown when soil temps are below 60 degrees will sprout and will grow but often will not grow in a vigorous manner and will not produce many cukes if they produce any at all. In some climates, the spring weather goes from too cold to too hot very quickly and gardeners in those climates need to plant early to beat the heat, and that may mean planting in soil temps below 60 degrees. If that is the case where you live, you can warm up the soil by putting black plastic down on top of it for 2 or 3 weeks before your planting time. That might help keep the soil warmer and allow you to plant 'early' but also in warm-enough soil that the plants won't remain stunted and nonproductive. And, when I say stunted, I don't necessarily mean they won't be big plants, but just that their reproductive ability is impaired, which is a form of stunting that you can't observe visually so you don't realize it exists until you realize that your plants have failed to produce as they should.

Do you know your soil's pH? Sometimes a plant will grow in a pH outside its preferred range, but it won't be healthy enough to produce. Cukes normally prefer soil with a pH between 6.0 and 7.0.

Cukes are hungry plants and I think of them as heavy feeders. I try to give them really rich fertile soil that was amended well in the fall before I put the plants there in the spring. I don't necessarily measure the size of the cucumber bed and sit and calculate out exactly how much compost or manure to add to a raised bed because I just follow my instincts and add the amount of organic matter that 'feels right' but if I had to guess, I'd say I add about 60-80 lbs. of compost and manure to every hundred square feet of raised bed every fall. Sometimes it is more if I think the plants in that bed had fertility-related issues during the previous growing season, and sometimes it is less if the current plan is for a light feeder to go into that bed in late winter or early spring. In my garden, I have found it is almost impossible to add too much organic matter because 'heat eats compost' so that whatever I add one autumn is mostly digested and used up by the following year. In a more moderate climate with cooler summers, such heavy amending might not be necessary, but since high temperatures make compost break down so quickly, we do have to amend heavily to maintain great soil fertility.

Another temperature issue I failed to mention above is extreme air temp fluctuation in early spring. Cucumbers need to grow in air temps that remain above 55 degrees consistently, and here in southern OK that can be hard to ensure. The last few years I've had overnight lows fall into the 30s in early May and that's hard on plants that already are enduring daytime highs in the 80s and 90s.

Finally, be sure you are not leaving a single cuke on the plant too long. Remember that plants produce fruit in order to produce seeds so that they can ensure the survival of their species. If you leave the cukes (or even a single cuke) on the plant too long and the fruit/seeds are maturing, the plant knows (likely via a chemical or hormonal message) it already has produced seeds to perpetuate its species, so it does not necessarily get in a hurry to make any more seeds. If you pick all the cucumbers regularly at the younger, smaller size best for pickling, then production shouldn't shut down if all other things are the way they ought to be in terms of soil fertility, soil pH, available moisture, etc.

And, as always if you have soil with a medium to high sandy content, when you pull up plants after they are done, carefully check the roots for signs of nematodes. Lots of folks never realize they have root knot nematodes in the soil that significantly impact the productivity of their plants.

I hope that something I said here helps you figure out why cucumbers just won't produce well there for you in your climate. As for the Armenian cukes, I'd bet it is the heat because even though they like heat, they only like it up to a certain point. Now that the monsoon season has arrived, I bet they will be producing better.

Dawn

Lots to think about. I think this spring's failure was caused by a few things. The spot I picked had less than full sun, which I thought would help with heat stress but probably hurt, because it was actually a heat sink from the brick house and sidewalk. This location also has compacted soil and poor drainage. Finally, I suspect that this spot has very high pH, because my chard just loves it. Given the high natural pH in AZ and our caliche, along with the foundation concrete, the pH in that spot is probably the highest of all my beds. I did plant the lemon cucumber this spring and got one cucumber before it got hit with aphids but it was planted almost two months later than ideal planting date because I was still building the raised beds.
I think my difficulty in germinating the cucumbers on time may have been because I didn't plant in full sun and because we had a cooler than normal spring with some late freezes. I will try pre warming the soil next year or even starting the plants indoors, since it seems like we have a short window of opportunity in the spring here in AZ.
I'm preparing a much better spot for my fall cucumbers in a new,raised bed with tons of horse manure. The corn didn't do great in this location, but I'm adding more manure and making the bed twice as deep. I should be ready by early next week. Best planting time is August fifteenth, so I'm not too far off the ideal. The following are the seeds that I have:
Lemon cucumber
Little Tyke
National Pickling
Calypso
Beit Alpha
Diva

I think I'll order some County Fair. I'll also be sure to toss some sulphur in my raised bed, along with some gypsum, which I usually add, to help open up that clay underneath. Should I add bone meal or anything else, while I'm adding to the soil?
There will probably be more organic matter than soil, at this point, which could cause problems with salts, but so far, everything has seemed to like the composted manure mix, even the cowpeas, although I did have some aphids on the long beans.

I think my Armenians, and the Lemon Cucumber that I just pulled up, have been suffering from Cucurbit Yellow Stunting Disorder Virus. The pictures and description sound just like what my plants have gone through and I did have just a few white flies earlier this summer.
A new problem to deal with, as if I didn't have enough problems growing cucumbers!