Amy, are yours in the ground or in containers?

Mary, mine are in beds. Thanks Jerry, I will order some seed.

You can spray cucumbers with Daconil, but remember its function is as a preventive, so it performs best when used regularly from shortly after the plants either emerge from the ground or are transplanted. Once the plants are obviously so ill you think they are dying, it probably is too late. AND, it is good only on fungal issues and will not help plants with bacterial or viral diseases. So, I wouldn't spray if I wasn't sure that the actual problem is fungal in nature. For some fungal diseases that strike cucumbers, Mancozeb probably is a better choice. You could use it if the problem is anthracnose, gummy stem blight, downy mildew, or cercospora leaf spot. Daconil could be used for anthracnose, gummy stem blight, alternaria leaf spot, powdery mildew, downy mildew, cercospora leaf spot or scab. If desired, you can use sulfur for powdery mildew, but only when high temperatures are consistently remaining below 85 degress. Copper can be used for down mildew and alternaria leaf spot. One problem with cucumbers (just like tomatoes and many other veggies) is that the conditions that lead to one problem also can lead to others, so often you have multiple problems on the same plants and this can make diagnosis and treatment tricky.

I grow County Fair every year because it is the only pickling cucumber variety that is tolerant of bacterial wilt, which is spread by cucumber beetles. I usually grow 1 or 2 other varieties and, inevitably, they succumb to disease before it does. I didn't grow it this summer though.

When I grew Sumter several years back, I really liked it. With National Pickling cucumber, there is something about our soil or disease profile it doesn't like---it is always the first pickling cucumber variety to die, so I no longer grow it here.

Little-Leaf H-19 was bred in Arkansas and seems almost as well-suited to our climate as County Fair, so most years I grow one or the other or both of these, and then about every other year I add Sumter or something else. It depends on how many pickles I'm hoping to make.

Sometimes you just have to experiment to see what works best in your soil and your growing conditions, with your rainfall and your disease pressure. I have grown a gazillion pickling cucumber varieties over the years trying to find the ones that work best for us. Doing that whole search for the best varieties for a specific garden and location is just part of gardening, and I'm glad that for me, the search is over. There were too many years where I was trying one variety or another and not getting enough to make all the pickles I wanted to make.

My Little Leafs are looking fantastic, growing on anything that doesn't get out if it's way fast enough, but they are slow to set fruit. They aren't curling, though, or making weird shapes. One at a time, it seems. I'm still waiting for it to blow up with fruit. I've tried Sumter, and I found it's production to be low. Might be just me, but I though they were just OK. Haven't found County Fair seeds anywhere yet. I think National Pickling isn't resistant to the kinds of diseases we have around here.

If anyone wants a good, disease resistant slicer, General Lee is out ahead of Little Leaf in production. Hasn't looked bothered by all the rain or humidity at all. And, they taste great.

Still want to try Lone Jack's Vertina. And an English type, too. I hear about Sweet Success, but I'm put off by the price of seeds. Not because I don't think it'll be good, but because I'm not a good enough gardener yet to take that kind of financial risk.

County Fair seed is available through any of the companies owned by whichever company now owns Jung, Vermont Bean Seed Company, Totally Tomatoes, R. H.Shumway, Seymour's Selected Seed, Roots & Rhizomes, etc.

It always is quick to produce for me, perhaps because it is all-female and pollination is not an issue.

Here's its listing from Jung:

County Fair Pickling Cucumber

I got County Fair from Seeds n Such.

I've grown County fair, Little Leaf, Alibi, Chicago Pickling, Boston Pickling, National pickling and Vertina. I liked most of them OK but Vertina out produces them all in my garden and they stay really crunchy when pickled. You have to pick them every 3-4 days especially if you want lots of smaller 2-3" gherkin size. The ones missed that grow to 6" or so are still good for fresh eating because the seeds stay soft and immature.

I think Johnny's is one of the few vendors that sell Vertina and the seeds are a little expensive especially if you just buy the 30 seed packed but the price per seed is substantially reduced if you go for the 250 seed packet and maybe share an order with other gardeners.

I just pulled my plants out on Saturday. This 4' trellis alone with 6 plants produced about 80 lbs.

Garden pictures · More Info

Here are some of them after harvesting and washing.

Garden pictures · More Info

Amy, The guy who owns Seeds N Such used to own all those companies I listed above. I believe that when he sold them, he signed a non-compete clause that lasted for X number of years. As soon as that clause expired, he founded Seeds N Such. I haven't bought anything from them yet but it looked to me like he was beating his former companies on price when I looked at his first or second catalog a few years back. So, I'm not surprised he has a lot of the same seeds that they carry---he knows good varieties from experience.

Jack, Your cukes look great. I'll have to give Vertina a try one of these days. It has been hard to find varieties that the cucumber beetles cannot kill by giving them bacterial wilt, so I don't experiment as much as I once did since County Fair is the only one I've found that laughs in the face of BW. The BW will eventually kill it, but it takes a long, long, long time.

Are you anywhere close to the ongoing flooding in Kansas City? It looks pretty bad on TV.

Dawn

Dawn - Yeah, the flooding is really bad today especially in the areas that got dumped on 3 times in a 24 hour period. I had to take a detour on the way to work this morning when I got about 10 miles from my office. All the roads in 3 directions were closed so I had to turn around. One creek called Indian Creek has flooded the same business area 3 times in the last month and this time it is supposed to crest 10' higher than the previous record set just 2 weeks ago.

I didn't notice any flooding near my house but then it was dark when I left home. I didn't encounter any water over the road until I had to turn around as mentioned above but the police had already blocked the roads there.

We have had over 20" at my house in the last month but nearly all of it in 3 events. I've still needed to water parts of my garden a few times in between the rains.

Jack, You're having the kind of rain we had in May 2015----a bit over 24" for the month and a little over 12" was all in one day. We built our house on the highest point of our land so we'd be safe from big rainfall like that, but our creek was a raging monster. At times, even the bar ditches out here in the country also were raging monsters, and the Red River got higher than it ever had gotten before in some places. There was a lot of worry that they'd have to shut down the I-35 bridge because of the way the water was lapping at the roadway, but they never had to shut it down.

Being sparsely populated, we did not have nearly as many people at risk of being washed away like y'all have had up there today, for which I'm grateful.

It seems crazy to me you had to water in between heavy storms, but I understand it. I'm in the same boat here pretty much every summer---even when it is raining pretty heavily pretty often, it never really seems to be enough to free up a gardener from having to water. I should have watered this morning, but I am holding out for that rain that's in the forecast for tonight. It is only a 50% chance, so it could miss us. You know how it goes----if I had watered this morning, that would have guaranteed heavy rain tonight. Since I didn't water, the rain probably will miss us. In that case, I'll be out watering tomorrow.

There's a tropical wave down in the Gulf of Mexico---the remains of a poorly organized storm called Harvey. Usually at this time of the year that is the way we get our rain at the end of the summer---a tropical cyclone hits Texas or Mexico and sends bands of rain our way. This one probably fell apart too early to do that, at least for folks as far north as I am. Even if it doesn't reorganize into another tropical storm or hurricane, it still could dump a load of rain on coastal areas.

Here's the 7-Day QPF showing what could happen. I know it rarely is 'right on' but sometimes it is surprisingly close to being accurate:

7-Day QPF

Some folks will look at this and be worried about too much rain. Me? I'm looking at the forecast amount for my area and feeling like it won't be enough.

Dawn

Well, it looks like you got at least some rain overnight Dawn. No watering today!

Most of the stuff I had to water between heavy rainstorms was the newly transplanted things like the broccoli and cauliflower. I noticed that a few days to a week after the heavy rains the Vertina cucumbers really cranked out a lot of fruit so fast that I had trouble keeping up with the harvest. When I have to water them the harvest is a little easier to manage with 2 pickings a week.

Speaking of cucumber beetles, I think they may be in the process of bringing down one of my zucchini plants with bacterial wilt. I've been diligent about removing squash bug eggs from the plants but I've seen several striped and spotted CBs on them since they started blooming a couple weeks ago. One of the plants was pretty wilted last night but the other still looks fine. I may be yanking out the wilted one today.

Hey Jack, I got 1.5" of the most glorious slow and steady rainfall. It woke me up, but not in a bad way like with tons of thunder and lightning---just in a good way with the sound of steady rain. I woke up, thought "what is that sound?", figured out it was rain and fell right back asleep. That leaves us with 9.4" at our house for August so far. I think the record for August at our OK Mesonet station is 10.6" or something like that. Our average August rainfall is about 2.6". I don't know if the Mesonet station will set a new record in August 2017 because several times it has received substantially less rain than we have, but I do think that, at our house at least, that 10.6" record is in danger of falling by the end of the month. Well, unless the rain just completely stops. To get this much rainfall in a month when we normally are just hoping and praying to get any decent rainfall at all is overwhelming.

Our fields and roadsides are full of odd green stuff. Oh, wait, that's grass. Usually in summer it is tan/wheat-colored/brown and turning black (after it burns). I think that in early September, I will lock up the poultry in their run for about a week or two and make them stay there instead of free-ranging so that we can overseed the lawn with rye grass for winter. We don't usually do that in an average year, but it seems like a good idea this year because all this summer rain is producing copious amounts of vegetation that will become abundant fuel for winter wildfires. I like having a green envelope of defensible lawn space around our house in winter when we are expecting a bad fire year. Oddly, some of our worst wildfire winters have followed wet summers, not dry ones. In the dry summers, the ground doesn't produce enough vegetation sometimes for us to have an increased fire risk.

I'm keeping an eye on Harvey's remnants down in the Gulf. I don't think that any tropical cyclone that forms, if it even happens, will be coming into the Texas coast at the right angle to send bands of rain up here after it makes landfall, but then you never really know. By Thursday night or Friday, its' projected path should be more certain. I feel sorry for whichever cities along the Gulf coast are likely to be pounded with all its rain.

I am so thrilled with this rainfall even though everything is so muddy outdoors that it looks like Springtime. Augustus will have his choice of puddles to stand in today, though it might not even be hot enough for him to decide to chill by standing in a puddle.

Have a great day everyone.

Dawn