Cucumbers – plenty & pickling

This year I’ve grown a different variety of cucumber. Normally I grow ”Burpless Tasty Green” which are an outdoor variety and are usually quite successful in the greenhouse and outdoors. This year, however, I had run out of seed (I know, I should have checked). Anyway, I had to go to the local garden centre and buy a packet of seed. The result was a Mr Fothergills ”Telepathy”. This is an F1 hybrid. I’m not usually in favour of F1 hybrids as the seeds are more expensive and, in my experience, more likely to become unavailable as the parent plants die off or the seed producers find something different.

However, hybrid seeds are meant to be more productive and this seems to be the case. I’ve five plants, three in the greenhouse and two outdoors in the tunnel. So far (mid July) I’ve had six cucumbers and there are seven more reasonable sized fruit already on the plants with a large quantity of others looking like they will set and grow. It’s not really a problem, we like cucumbers in our salads and I’m going to make some pickle using the recipe I found and published last year. This time I’m going to cut the cucumbers into rounds rather than sticks and I probably won’t make the full quantity of vinegar as I seem to remember that it made too much.

The pickle was tasty, quite a lot like burger pickle and someth