Description

Cucumber Telegraph
Cucumis sativus

English-style green cucumber, harvested between 20 and 30 cm long. Excellent flavor, few seeds. Burpless* type. Climbs easily. Slight parthenocarpic tendency, but will produce much more with pollination. Old European variety also known as English Telegraph or Telegraph Improved. 65 days to maturity.

Full sun. Well-drained, rich soil. Direct sowing after the last frost or indoor sowing 2 to 5 weeks before. Protect young plants from insects at the beggining of the season. 1.5 cm deep. 40 cm between plants.

Germination: 99% in November 2025
Ecological seeds produced at Catherine’s Ornamental Garden.

*Burpless cucumbers have a lower concentration of cucurbitacin, a thin skin and few or no seeds. Telegraph, Muncher and Three white sheet cucumbers are burpless.

Note
To grow straight cucumbers like the ones you get at the grocery store or from your family farmer, they need to grow unhindered. Climbing them on a trellis does just that, and takes up less floor space. But straight or crooked, it doesn’t change their flavor 😉

We’ve been wanting to get the Telegraph cucumber in our catalog for a few years now. We had put it into production in 2021, but some of the plants in the plot had yielded gherkins rather than English cucumbers. That year, we gave away tubs and tubs of cucumbers and didn’t harvest any seed. It’s very frustrating to scrap a year’s production, especially when it’s a cucurbit! Many thanks to François ‘Veda’ Lamontagne, seed producer in the Granby area, for providing us with quality seeds for our summer production!