The vines had no disease or pests concerns on the plant and the fruit grew at a steady rate until I was done growing them.
Additionally, the vines grew to a medium length before setting fruit and the fruit is dense-fleshed.
I would say that, if you are looking for a consistent average pickling cucumber, National Pickling is the one for you
The English Telegraph is a very tasty cucumber variety that I happened to experience difficulty growing in 2020. The vines were no problem, as they started off just fine and they grew for quite a while. However, there were some problems associated with growing the fruit.
It seemed that, based on the looks of the cucumbers that were being set every time the female flowers set that the fruit was suffering from poor pollination. This flies in the face of the claims of various seed companies that advertise English Telegraph as parthenocarpic. Not setting high-quality cucs because of poor pollination is definitely not a characteristic of parthenocarpic cucumbers.
While I will not judge these company’s intentions, I could find no substantial evidence to demonstrate that the English Telegraph Cucumber is, in fact, parthenocarpic. On the contrary, the more I researched reliable studies, the more I found that there are very few parthenocarpic cucumber varieties at all that are not, by nature, hybrid.
So it ended up taking a while for this cucumber variety to really get off the ground with reliable high-quality fruit production. However, once the vines grew long enough, they were able to produce very nice long cucumbers. Perhaps this is just one of the traits of the English Telegraph cucumber variety – that it does not set good fruit until the vines are long enough.
In any case, no matter the fruit shape or length, it had a nice smooth texture and a pleasant palatable taste. It was very similar to many of the Japanese cucumber varieties I had previously grown, howbeit I doubt that the English Telegraph is nearly as heat-resistant as many of the Asian cucumber varieties are.
The color of this cucumber is generally dark green, but
there are some light stripes that come in a striped format from the
center of where the petals of the female flower formed. These are very
similar to a comet or a shooting star. Perhaps I’m the only one who
appreciates this?
Given the option between field growing and trellising, I would definitely trellis the Early Fortune cucumbers. They seem to want to grow a little longer, but can have some difficulty in determining which direction to grow.
Overall, the production of this variety was
good, and the flavor was pretty standard for fruit in the pickling class
of cucumbers.
While I do have a lot to say about some of the cucumbers I grew this last year, there is very little that I have to say about the Double Yield Cucumber.
It seemed to be an
average pickler, without any major problems. It grew steadily and did
what cucumbers should.
As with some of my other cucumber varieties that I grew, there were some concerns with complete pollination and catfacing, but otherwise the vines did just fine with producing cucumbers that would work for pickling.
