Telegraph Cucumber
Why I grow it
Telegraph is the cucumber I want when I want an actual cucumber — long, crisp, juicy and refreshing, with plenty of flesh and relatively few seeds.
It's beautiful sliced into summer salads, but if I'm honest there's another reason it keeps earning space in my garden: one of my favourite recipes from one of my favourite cookbooks turns it into the most glorious cucumber, celery and apple granita.
At a glance
Type: Long cucumber
Fruit: Long, smooth and dark green
Growth: Vigorous climbing vine
Position: Full sun
Support: Best grown vertically
Best for: Fresh eating, salads and summer drinks & dishes
Harvest: Pick while firm and crisp
In the kitchen
Telegraph is an excellent fresh-eating cucumber: crisp slices in salads, sandwiches, cold noodle dishes, tzatziki or simply eaten straight from the garden.
But this is one of the main reasons I grow it:
Cucumber, Celery & Apple Granita with Juniper Sugar
The recipe is from Alice Zaslavsky's In Praise of Veg, one of my favourite cookbooks. It combines Telegraph cucumber with celery, green apple, lime and mint, then serves the icy granita with juniper and lime sugar.
We serve ours in frozen glasses with cucumber tucked into the ice — and on a hot summer day it is ridiculously good.
Find the recipe: Alice Zaslavsky, In Praise of Veg, p. 420.
In the garden
Telegraph is a vigorous climbing cucumber and particularly good grown vertically. Give it a sturdy trellis, arch or frame and let it head upwards — keeping those long developing fruit off the ground and making them considerably easier to find amongst the foliage.
Pick regularly while the cucumbers are firm and crisp rather than letting them become oversized.
Care
Grow in rich, fertile, well-drained soil in full sun. Keep watering consistent, particularly once flowering and fruiting begins, and feed regularly through the growing season.
Give the vines something sturdy to climb from the beginning. Cucumbers have absolutely no interest in waiting politely while you construct something later.
What you'll receive
One healthy, established plant grown here at A Garden Between. Plants naturally vary in size and shape and may be supplied in reused nursery pots or growing bags — perfectly useful plastic doesn't need replacing simply because it doesn't match.