For most gardeners, one of the most favorite crops is undoubtedly cucumber. After all, it is good and fresh, and canned. Not everyone thinks that different varieties and hybrids differ in their purpose. Some cucumbers are good for pickling, and others are tastier fresh.
To salad are hybrids with fruit and medium length, with smooth or lumpy surface, with the peel of medium density, crisp texture of the flesh, refreshing taste and a distinctive cucumber flavor. Modern salad hybrids are characterized by genetically determined absence of bitterness.
Usually salad varieties and hybrids are grown in protected soil, so they must be well adapted to growing conditions in greenhouses, have a high yield and a long period of fruiting, so that vegetable growers-lovers all summer rejoiced fresh cucumbers on their table.
An important characteristic is precocity, because the first cucumber is especially tasty, and you want to get it as soon as possible.
Among the variety of hybrids, you can choose what is more to your taste.
Cucumbers for canning
It is believed that pickling can be any of the cucumber and very small ovaries, and normally grown fruits, and even overgrown – almost seed plants with seeds. For canning, with vinegar you can use and short cucumbers, and with longer fruits. Put in a jar and whole fruits, and cut – as part of any assorted salads. But those who appreciate not only the taste, but the beauty of preserved vegetables, of course, prefer to use for preparations for the winter for a nice little cucumbers, for which it is best to grow short parthenocarpic hybrids in protected and open ground.
Plants of these hybrids have a female or predominantly female type of flowering, which means that they have precocity and high yield. In addition, they tie fruits in any weather, as they do not depend on bee pollination.
The abundance of ovaries formed hybrids with fruit of the flowering type. “Bouquets” of ovaries (3-5 pieces or more) are very convenient for harvesting not only in the form of greens of normal size (10-12 cm), but also in the form of gherkins (6-8 cm), and in the form of pickles (3-5 cm). And the smaller the size of the fruit, the more they can be collected from the plant.
Bee pollinated varieties and hybrids for salting
No matter how cute nor was parthenocarpic cucumber, but pickling (without using vinegar) they fit worse than a bee pollinating varieties and hybrids of open ground. No wonder bee-pollinated cucumbers have always been considered tastier, sweeter, more fragrant. To obtain delicious, crispy pickles, able to maintain their remarkable qualities until spring, you need to collect the fruits in the open ground in the first half of August, because at this time they are gaining the most amount of sugars and vitamins.
Modern bee pollinated cucumber hybrids for open ground combine high saline qualities with high yield and resistance to diseases.
Tip: add the pickle red currants!
To give our pickles a spicy taste, you can add berries or red currant juice to the jars as a preservative. This recipe is already known to summer residents and many like it.
Salt cucumbers as usual, with vinegar or without it, and in a liter jar pour about 50 g of berries or red currant juice. In further processing of the jars with cucumbers – the usual. It turns out very beautiful, and most importantly delicious and unusual. This season in the banks with currant fill got large enough the cucumbers from last fees.
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