The Cucumber has been a staple part of fresh salads for a long time, the texture and the moisture in the cucumber make it a refreshing addition to any salad or food dish, cucumbers are available in a wide range of types and varieties for a host of different applications.
Cucumbers need plenty of natural sunlight and require free draining soil to yield a bumper crop for harvesting, planting cucumbers is water logged areas will encourage the spread of disease and will severely limit the available produce, they also need plenty of room to spread out there vines.
Cucumber varieties are usually breed for a specific purpose although they can be used for multi purpose situations, cucumbers for salads and eating natural as they are, tend to have a thin skin and and sweet taste, varieties like the Telegraph Cucumber are popular and are a major seller in the supermarkets.
The apple cucumber is another popular variety these types are more compact than the Telegraph cucumber and sort of resemble an apple, they have a mild and sweet flavour however the skin is thick and rather hard so the apple cucumber needs to be peeled before eating.
Cucumbers that are specifically breed for pickling are generally short and have mini spines on them the Gherkin is an example of a good pickling cucumber, these type of cucumbers are usually dry in texture and lack the freshness of the popular eating cucumbers this is why they are pickled and they soak up the flavour from the brine they are pickled in.
Cucumbers like a wide variety of other vegetables and fruits come in two main types parthenocarpic these require no pollination and are all female plants this type of cucumber are best suited to greenhouse cultivation, and gynecoecous these are mainly female plants but require pollination from outside sources.
The cucumber depending on the variety grown is not just limited to growing on the ground this is the most common method, other methods are growing them up trellis and stacks and they can be grown like beans on a fence type system these methods ensure the cucumber is kept clean and out of to much moisture lying on the ground.
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