Worked with Mario in his vegetable garden.
Thinned the rest of the chard bed.
Thinned the rest of the chard bed.
He showed me how he trained his cucumbers at a young stage. He grows them under glass and prefers to do so because when they are grown outside their skins are tougher and more spiny. He also trains them more like the commercial way to produce more straight fruit. The reason why cucumbers become bendy is when the fruit is touching each other. This is the second lot that he is doing, so he has changed the grow bags he grew the first lot in, because crop rotation principle for him here still applies, he never grows the same annual crop in one place even within one growing season.
He ties a string around a grow bag, firm but not tight, then has it attached vertically to the top of the glasshouse. Eventually he will train forty five degrees against the slope of the glass roof. Commercially they train it forty five degrees from the ground first, then straight up. They grow them up to 5m high, then lower them down on one big grid system to pick.
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Photo 1: Cucumber grown in grow bags. |
The varieties he grows are female ones. Modern seeds are bred to be of this gender anyway. But cucumbers are usually dioecious. Even so male cucumbers does sometimes appear (they are the flowers from a stalk rather than a fruit), these are snipped off too because if they pollinate together, the cucumber will produce seed and will taste bitter.
Harvested and cleared an area of small area within a bed of beetroot - sowed Lamb's Lettuce Valerianella locusta CAPRIFOLIACEAE - roughly 1 - 2 cm apart. Cylindrical frames and string is always put across sown beds to deter the public from standing in them.
Chicory Catalogna - you eat the flowering stems.
Celery sprayed approx. twice a year for root aphid and leaf miner.
Took outdoor chillies to polyhouse to ripen off.