The Spacemaster Cucumber

My experience with the Spacemaster cucumber was somewhat interesting. It grew rather well and normal, generally speaking. The Spacemaster cucumber variety put on fruit a little early and the fruit did mostly grow near the center of the plant – meaning that it was a little more “bushy” than your average cucumber variety. However, this is about where the space efficiency stops.

If I were wanting something that was much more space-efficient I would grow something like a Light Carosello Leccese for fresh eating or Arkansas Little Leaf for pickling. But I suppose if I had a bucket that was large enough, then this would be a fine variety to grow there.

The productivity of this variety was good and the color of the cucumbers was interesting with some of them having stripes coming from the flower tip in a star-shaped lighter color that spreads across the length of the fruit. As a dual purpose (fresh-eating and pickling) cucumber variety, I am sure that Spacemaster would do fine.

 

The Muncher Cucumber

Other than a few of my bushy Carosello varieties, I have yet to grow any cucumber vines that I would consider to be “bushy”. However, the Beit Alpha variety Muncher seems to be as close to bushy as any regular Cucumis Sativus cucumber variety that I have grown. Muncher is a very thin-skinned cucumber with female flowers that begin to form soon after the male flowers appear.

 

 

The taste of these is generally bitter-free and the taste is not offensive. This is considered a compliment to the variety given that I do not care for the Beit Alpha class generally speaking.

 

Though some people may love Lebanese cucumber varieties, I would dare anyone to even attempt to have a blind taste competition between any Beit Alpha cucumber compared to something like a Meloncella Fasciata (Striped Carosello Leccese) or a Tondo Barese.

In any case, if you are looking for a fast-maturing, smooth thin-skinned cucumber variety with decent texture and tolerable taste, this is definitely the one for you.

 

The National Pickling Cucumber

The National Pickling Cucumber is a consistent blocky cucumber that is pretty solid.

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

 

 

English Telegraph Cucumber

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.