Performance of cucumber varieties in a naturally ventilated polyhouse

Abstract

Cucumber is one of the most preferred vegetables grown under protected conditions in the developed world. Its demand is throughout the year because of its popular use in salad dish, sandwich, pizza preparations etc. In India it is traditionally grown in zaid and kharif seasons. However, being a high value low volume crop, its exploitation on commercial scale in poly-green-house as off-season crop can generate handsome income to the growers. Compared to open field, very high yields of cucumber have been reported even under naturally ventilated polyhouse (Srivastava and Singh, 7). A numbers of hybrids have been recently developed in the country in this crop but little effort has been made so far to evaluate them for their suitability of growing under greenhouse conditions. With this view, screening of available varieties under protective cover was carried out to identify suitable varieties for off-season production with superior quality