I've been keeping the bugs at bay with homemade insect repellent using lemongrass, cinnamon and peppermint.

==>> how often do you spray them.. are there reallly that many bugs.. and do you spray in sun???

whats your potting media ...

are your pots black.. and in full sun... do the pots themselves get very hot.. roots prefer to be cool.. not baked in sun ...

are the pots on pavement that retains heat all night long???

how about a pic of the whole plant ...

what was the side dressing.. and why did you think is was needed???

ken

I spray them every few days. If I didn't spray them, there would be a billion bugs. They seem very attractive to all manner of insects. I don't have a set time of day that I spray them.

My potting soil is coconut coir, compost, vermiculite and some initial 10-10-10 fertilizer. I made the mix fresh for these plants; nothing else has grown in it. They are in brown fabric pots sitting on cardboard boxes covered in plastic at the edge of a patio. The plastic bags are just to keep the cardboard boxes from turning into mush when the plant gets watered. They don't really get hot, and I have some Okinawan sweet potatoes in a 20 gal fabric pot that seem to do fine on the same patio.

A lot of advice I've read on the web is to fertilize the plants after they start blooming, which I didn't do. I see very little growth right now. When they were growing good I would notice some growth every day. So I've very recently side dressed them with a small amount of 10-10-10. All these issues pre-date said side dressing.

Anthracnose fungal disease would be my first suspect. It is rather common in all cucurbit crops and your pictures are dead on signs of the disease.

Anthracnose of cucurbits

It looks like the plant is getting too large for that little container - a grow bag? http://ipm.ucanr.edu/home-and-landscape/cucumber/

I'm not an expert, but my first thougth on seeing your photo was sunscald from water/bug mixture being on the leaves when the hot sun is out. Could you take your leaf to a the local County Ag Extension? Those people usually can answer just about any question you might have.

Maybe a trick of the photo, but that pot looks too small for that plant. Roots may have run out of space. Cucumbers are heavy feeders.

The root pouches are 5 gallons which is listed as suitable to according to the manufacturer: https://rootpouch.com/downloads/RootPouch_FarmtoTable_85x11_gal_FINAL.pdf

I'm going to try neem oil instead of my lemongrass solution.

I grow Armenian cukes every year. This year, as usual, I am overflowing with them. Just tried making Armenian pickles. Nice.

If your growing container is too small, you aren't going to get spots on your leaves. The plant will just slow down growing. If they're too hot, they'll just die. Anthracnose sounds like a possibility,