Those long narrow cucumbers you see wrapped in plastic in supermarkets, the ones with thin skins you don’t have to peel, no seeds, and a bitter-free, burpless taste, are often called English cucumbers, greenhouse cucumbers, or seedless cucumbers. They are much more expensive than the traditional cucumber… and that can encourage gardeners try growing them in their home gardens. But the results are often disappointing.
This kind of cucumber is parthenocarpic, that is to say it produces fruit without having been fecundated (that’s why its seeds never fully develop). Moreover, it produces only female flowers, eliminating the risk of accidental self-pollination. A a result, English cucumbers are almost always grown commercially inside a greenhouse. This prevents any insects from pollinating them, as that would result in misshapen fruit.
Home gardeners aren’t always aware of this important detail and sow theirs not only outdoors, but close to regular cucumbers, that is ones that are bisexual and produce both male and female flowers. As a result bees and other pollinators carry pollen from the male flowers of regular cucumbers to the female flowers of the English cucumbers, resulting in lumpy, irregular fruit with seeds, not at all like the select vegetable sold in the supermarket. What a disappointment!
Grow Them On Their Own
If you want to grow English cucumbers outdoors and get acceptable results, make sure there are no regular cucumbers within 115 feet (35 m). That means you can forget growing them in a community garden, because there will certainly be other gardeners growing regular cucumbers, but you can often get good results in a backyard veggie bed… as long as you forgo ordinary cukes for the season. And as long as your immediate neighbors are not gardeners too!
Note too that to produce long straight fruit, developing English cucumbers must not touch the ground, otherwise they will curve. Therefore you pretty much have to grow them on some sort of trellis so the long fruits will be suspended in the air.
Not Yet Time to Sow
If I write this in March is that it’s so you’ll have time to order the right cucumber seeds for your needs, but obviously it is still far too early to sow them indoors in most climates. Cucumbers need only a 3- to 4-week head start on the outdoor growing season, if that. So most gardeners won’t need to sow them indoors before the month of May. Indeed, you can sow cucumbers directly outdoors in most climates, once the soil has warmed up of course, and still get great harvests!