Best Open Pollinated Cucumber Varieties

It happens every year. You think you’ve picked every ripe cucumber, but one sneaky fruit hides under leaves until it has passed its prime. With an open pollinated (OP) variety, you can opt to let an overripe fruit keep going until it produces mature seeds. At 100 seeds per fruit, you only need one or two to have plenty of seeds to save and share.

The best open pollinated cucumber varieties have stood the test of time, with gardeners saving and sharing seeds season after season. Vigorous, uniform and productive, the best open pollinated cucumber varieties come with high levels of genetic disease resistance as well.

Types of Cucumbers

When shopping for seeds, the main categories are slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, bush cucumbers, and burpless cucumbers. Each has their place in the garden, and on the plate!

Do be aware that cucumbers can cross, but it’s easy to keep a strain pure. When planning to save seeds from an open pollinated cucumber, I grow only the one variety in my garden until after the first fruits have set.

Disease Resistant Slicing Cucumbers

The dark-skinned all-purpose cucumbers sold in markets are slicing cucumbers. Fruits are picked when they are about 9 inches (23 cm) long and still have soft, immature seeds inside. Slicing cucumbers are great when eaten fresh, or you can make them into any type of pickle. Healthy plants can be hugely productive, especially when they are trellised.

The best OP cucumbers in this category are loaded with natural disease resistance, so they can stand up to challenges from Cucumber Mosaic Virus, Powdery Mildew, and some strains of Downy Mildew. The Marketmore variety, popular in the US and the UK, has been improved several times since its release by Cornell University in 1968. Modern versions are non-bitter, which also makes them less attractive to cucumber beetles.

The same is true of Poinsett, released by Cornell in 1976 and perhaps the most disease-resistant OP cucumber you can grow. After growing Poinsett for two years, I have yet to see a leafspot disease. The slender fruits are bitter-free and delicious, and the plants produce steadily for three weeks or more.

Productive Pickling Cucumbers

You can made sliced or diced pickles from any type of cucumber, but the best fermented pickles call for pickling cucumbers, which mature to less than 5 inches (13 cm) long. Compounds in the blossom ends enliven the fermentation process, which can proceed quite quickly when pickling cucumbers are fermented whole.

I am a long-time fan of Little Leaf because it carries rare resistance to bacterial wilt, a disease carried by cucumber beetles that causes plants to wilt to death, one branch at a time. It’s a great little cuke, but so is Homemade Pickles, which resists some strains of downy mildew and a slew of other diseases.

All pickles need not be green. White pickling cucumbers like Miniature White or Edmonson have long been popular because they offer a welcome color twist in pickles. Carrots, red onions, purple basil, or turmeric can tint batches in various colors, which makes homemade pickles even more fun to eat.

Compact Bush Cucumbers

The vines of most cucumbers run 6 feet (2 m) long, but bush cucumbers have shorter vines about 3 feet (1 m) long. They are easier to grow in small beds or containers, requiring only modest trellising to keep them upright. Despite their short vines, bush cucumbers like Bush Champion produce full-size cucumbers.

For compact size, great flavor, and disease resistance it’s hard to beat Spacemaster, one of the first non-bitter cucumbers developed in the 1970s. Updated for better disease resistance in 1980, Spacemaster resists powdery mildew and cucumber mosaic virus.

Open Pollinated Burpless Cucumbers

Before 1970, almost all cucumbers carried what’s called the bitter gene, which causes people to burp. Some people considered cukes inedible and called them cowcumbers! Any stress from heat, drought or cold could make cucumbers lose their sweetness and go bitter, and no amount of peeling would help. Thanks to genetic improvements made in the 1970s and ‘80s, most modern varieties are burpless.

Victorian era English gardeners were way ahead of the game. Working inside glassed conservatories, they developed the impossibly long, sweet-tasting Telegraph burpless cucumber. It went on to become the greatest grandparent of modern greenhouse cucumbers, most of which are hybrids. This is not a bad thing, because greenhouse cucumbers need special talents for enclosed conditions, which Ben Vanheems explains in his Cucumber Masterclass.

Nobody knows for sure, but it’s possible that Telegraph was once a descendent of Suyo Long, a long and curvy cucumber that has been cultivated in northern China for perhaps 3,000 years. Rarely seen in markets because the curved cukes won’t pack into a box, Suyo Long is still a great choice for long, burpless fruits to enjoy fresh or pickled. And should a big, fat fruit escape your harvesting efforts, you can save the seeds.