"0tterbot" wrote in message
i know - weird question g

Moved location and got some good rains perhaps? :-))

i love lebanese cucumbers, but they've never cropped well for me. last
year i spent every morning hand-fertilising the flowers (which gave a much
better result than previous years, but still fairly unimpressive i
suspect).

this year, i had been ignoring them in the pre-xmas kerfuffle, only to
discover they're cropping a treat without me!!

As you know, I'm not too far from you to the west so we have a similar
length of growing time between frosts. Last year we had a massive crop of
Lebanese cukes, in fact so many I just left them to rot in the end and now I
have self sown ones coming up in the silver beet and dangerously near the
carrots. I put them in a bed that had been heavily manured with horse poop
and we have no problems with water - even through the worst of the dry last
year we could give all the water we wanted to. I can't tell you what yuo
are doing right or wrong, just what we've experienced. This year the
seedling Leb cukes are doing well but I don't know if they ahve any fruit on
them yet as I haven't looked - I'm too busy checking up on the rockmelons
and orange watermelons which I am desperate to get. I'll check the Leb cukes
and the self sown ones tomorrow and let you know if anything interesting is
happening.

my first idea is that we've many, many bees & bugs now. i planted "bug
flowers" such as queen anne's lace & whatnot to bring more bugs, which
seems to be working. the bees were active all winter, too & are now
present in large numbers, yay. still, last year we seemed to have plenty
of bees anyway, but not many cucumbers. (?)

I've noticed how full of bees the stachys lanata and the lavendar is is the
past few weeks - simply alive with them.

i'm growing them up a fence this time, which i believe is recommended.
does anyone know what the difference might be with growing them upwards
instead of along the ground? (more bee action?)

Mine did well sprawling on the ground.

Fran