EarthBox 2015 Recap — The Cucumbers And Zucchini

by A.J. Coltrane

2013 Cucumbers and Zucchini recap here. 2014 here.

The Tromboncino produced 26.0 pounds this year. The 2014 total was 20.5 pounds. A 27% improvement!

(For reference – the trellis squares are 8″ x 8″. The fruit is 28″ long.)

Being the closest container to the west side of the house, the Tromboncino have been getting 1-2 hours less sun per day than some of the other, more favorable locations on the patio. Next year we may move them to the northwest corner of patio (the photo below was taken facing west, the northwest corner is at the the top right of the picture – that’s where the late morning sun hits first each day). If we do move the box then we’d turn the trellis 90 degrees so that it would run along the north edge of the patio. The difference in sun might help both the yield and with powdery mildew.

We grew two boxes of cucumbers this year — 8 plants total. I don’t think they liked the unusually hot weather. The cucumbers peaked early and disintegrated rapidly after that. In addition, they all became blocky, instead of long and pretty and straight. Bummer.

EarthBox #1 contained four Marketmore 76 cucumbers — the same thing as each of the last two years:

2013 yield – 56.0 pounds

2014 yield – 44.4 pounds

2015 yield – 28.6 pounds

Hopefully in a “normal” year we’ll see 40-50 pounds or so. That seems reasonable, and it would still be about 15 pounds per square foot of growing medium. I won’t complain if that’s the case.

Interestingly, I didn’t think the Marketmores were very photogenic this year. The last photo happened on June 15:

EarthBox #2 hosted two varieties of pickling cucumber (Calypso and National Pickling), and two Lemon cucumber plants.

Mixing two types of pickling cucumbers with very different maturity sizes was a bad idea. It was basically impossible to tell if we were looking a small National Pickling cucumber (which grow to a 6″ maximum) or a full-sized Calypso (3″ maximum). Together they produced 10.6 pounds. Not great.

The Lemon cucumbers did much better — 20.0 pounds from the two plants. I wish they were a little easier to process after harvesting; it’s way easier to peel a regular cucumber, in contrast to a slippery orb:

All up, box #2 yielded 30.6 pounds.  Between the two boxes we got 59.2 pounds of cucumbers(!) It’s too much, really. We’ll likely return to doing one box of cucumbers next year.

Now we just need to figure out what we’ll do with the “extra” box..

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Visit Dave at Ourhappyacres, host of Harvest Monday.