Jim. Your pictures are about right for cucumbers.
http://davesgarden.com/pdb/go/65600/index. contains picture of the zucchinni
Senator which is somewhar similar to the Dark Green.
O fcourse if you want large leaves on a vining plant, try a winter squash or
pumpkin. Of course these vines take up a lot of space.
Poinsett will be visually indistinguisable from Market more 76. You may notice
a difference in yields.
The soil in this part of Georgia is also sand and benefits greatly from any
type of organic matter being incorporated. If you use spagnum however, you wil
need to add dolomitic limestone to keep you soil pH up.
I've posted some pics of the cucumber that came off the plant.
The cuke was planted outside from a packet of Ferry Morse
Marketmore 76 seeds.
The leaves are about 5 inches wide, 5 inches high... John
Savage mentioned an A4 size paper. If that's the 11x17 I
will be thrilled and I think I will plant some seeds tonight.
I did pull some out of a package at one time, but I don't
think they ever germinated. If they did, they were the
plants that never made it past 3 inches high. Oh I have
some DM Ferry Poinsett seeds as well that have been
opened. Could be that set of seeds as well.
The Zuke seeds I have are some from a Walmart American
Seed (Squash Dark Green Zucchini) 10 cent package. g
You guys got me excited about 20 inch leaves. If the Zuchs are
not vines... what a shame... I got all excited about 17 inch leaves
on a vine. Awhh shucks. 17 inch leaves though... awesome! I
guess I'll have to space it away from some of the other stuff.
I'm in Tampa, FL. The soil is sandy for the most part. I've
been throwing some of that Viagro fertilizing pellets around.
I'm thinking the Yamato Cucumbers didn't fruit because they
are in the shade all day long, getting indirect sun. While the
Marketmore 76 cukes are in the shade getting some direct
sun, but not too much, as they are in the shade as well. They
seem to like the watered down fertilizer I've been using.
Water seems to pass down through their soil/sand pretty easily
so I threw a bunch of sphagnum peat on top, I'm not sure if
that is the way to go.
Coffee grounds don't seem to be very helpful for Cucumbers.
I'm wondering if I should be throwing some banana peals
down there?
In May or June, we had some roses that were hit by Black
Spot. All the leaves and branches were cut off because
baking soda and vegetable oil didn't seem to help. It struggled
to grow leaves, and I decided to stick some banana peels into
the blender and put the peels into the area around the roots.
That worked wonderfully! The bush grew plenty of leaves and
roses in about a month.
So I'm wondering if the same thing might help with cucumbers.
I want to take some of the burden of using that powdered
fertilizer away. Any comments or suggestions regarding that
will be greatly appreciated.
http://www.microcosmotalk.com/images/garden/cucumber/
The only thing I was unsure about was that all of my cuke
leaves are bigger than cigarette packs, so I was just leaning
into that John might have misposted something, because
the cuke leaves I'm seeing are 2x the size of a cigarette
pack... of course I don't smoke and maybe John's smokes
cigars and calls 'em cigarettes. ;-) What do I know? I've
seen Arnold Schwarzenager smoke a good size cigarette
(cigar) in a movie but that was just a movie and we all
know about the "bigger fish" stories that movies employ.
--
Jim Carlock
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