Plant Profile: Spacemaster 80 Cucumber

Image from Hometown Seeds

This might be the vegetable that I'm most excited about this year!  Last year we grew tomatoes and peppers but this year, we've expanded and included cucumbers and lettuce!  Pickles and cucumbers are very popular at our house.  So needless to say we're excited that we've started this plant.

This year, we planted the Spacemaster 80 Cucumber.  It's a variety that keeps its vines 2-3 feet long and is ideal for small space or container gardens. But don't let its small size fool you! This variety is an extremely prolific producer, so there are plenty of cucumbers for making pickles and snacking on!

Cucumber Basics

Cucumbers like a soil with a neutral pH and need consistent moisture, inconsistent water makes for weirdly shaped cucumbers.  These plants need about 1 inch of water a week.  These plants are not a fan of the cold at all, so make sure to keep an eye on the temperatures before you start your cucumbers.  They will not germinate in a soil temperature below 50°F, but you can start them indoors.  Cucumber roots are susceptible to transplant shock so sow them in peat pots to reduce the risk of this happening.  

Once your cucumbers get going, use liquid fertilizer to the soil around the stem. And once they start producing, pick cucumbers often!  Overly mature cucumbers slow the growth of younger cucumbers.  You can use a trellis or a tomato cage to wrangle your cucumbers and decrease the number of leaves on the vine and leave more rooms for cucumbers!

Spacemaster 80 Cucumber

Days to Maturity: 62 Days

Hardiness: Frost Sensitive annual

Plant dimensions: 2-3' vines

This variety is great for small gardens.  Not only does this variety grow smaller plants but it yields such a quantity that the instructions tell you to pick as much as possible.  Due to this, it's an incredibly popular garden vegetable for both container and in-ground gardens. This variety is also disease resistant to cucumber mosaic virus, downy mildew, powdery mildew, and scab! This variety is monoecious, meaning it has male and female reproductive organs on the same plant.  Which means that you don't have to make sure that you have male and female plants to grow fruits/vegetables (unlike the avocado which requires a male and a female plant to produce avocados). 

Just transplanted our seedlings this last weekend so we have yet to enjoy any of these cucumbers.  But I will be sure to add information as I learn more to each of these plant profiles!  What varieties of cucumbers have you grown? Do you have any tips and tricks to share? Let us know in the comments!



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