Bush Champion is a do again

This variety of cucumber did a lot better in my greenhouse than the Salad Bush variety that I tried last year.

The plants have remained fairly compact, and produced a lot of fruit, with not an over abundance of male flowers. The cucumbers in the above photo are still a few days from picking, even though they are more than eight inches long. These cucumbers are long and slender and are called slicers. If I let these grow a few more days they will add more girth, which is the way we like them.

There are a lot of cucumbers coming now, and I guess we should consider making bread and butter pickles, as you can only eat so many cucumbers a day...

As an aside, I was a member of a gardening forum in the UK where someone asked for help with greenhouse shading. There were a number of responses like white wash the panels, use old window curtains, purchase slats from hardware store, etc. I posted a photo of my greenhouse with the 45% shade cloth on it. I wrote that I researched shade cloths and this degree of shading is recommended for vegetables, and the cloth was purchased from a greenhouse supply company, I also wrote that I placed the cloth on the greenhouse when the sun was directly overheard, and removed it just prior to the sun going down. And, on cloudy overcast days I did not use it at all to allow the maximum amount of light for the plants. The response was a lot of childish Benny Hill wannabe comments like: "it looks like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak", "for my next trick, tomatoes."

If you look to the left of the cucumbers in the above photo you will see a very nice stand of beets growing next to the cucumbers. Hmmm, a cool weather crop growing nicely next to a warm weather crop, in a greenhouse, in summer! What's up with that??

I decided that the forum members were not really interested in any other point of view , but would prefer to stumble on using window curtains and slats, so I deleted my post, and bailed out of the forum. So, let them hang their curtains and paint their greenhouses with whitewash, and on cloudy days it will be like growing in a fog. It would be a cold day in hell before I would whitewash polycarbonate panels.