Cucumber Burpless Tasty Green F1

The outdoor cucumber that finally gives greenhouse quality from a garden bed. Long, slender, smooth-skinned fruits of 25 to 30cm with the clean crisp taste of a glasshouse cucumber, but hardy enough for a sheltered spot outdoors in Britain.

Burpless is not marketing language. Traditional outdoor ridge cucumbers carry compounds called cucurbitacins that cause the bitterness and the indigestion people associate with them, and this variety was bred specifically to reduce both. There is no need to peel it.

It produces mostly female flowers, which means more fruit per plant than an old ridge type would give you. Water it generously and evenly — cucumbers are almost entirely water, and irregular watering is what produces bitter, misshapen fruit. One well-grown plant will give you twenty or thirty cucumbers across a season.