Cucumber is a very fast-growing plant. The downside of this fast-growing is that if the plant is trained to grow along a vertical wire (the training-wire), it quickly reaches the fixing point of the wire. This fixing
point of the training-wire wire is called the crop-wire.
Traditionally, when this point is reached, growers simply bend the top of the crop over the crop-wire. Due
to gravity, the top of the crop is then growing downward. When this downward growing top of the crop
gets some length (say 1,5 meter), the top is picked up and bent over the crop-wire again. This can be
repeated a third time, but after that, the bunch of leaves and stems becomes that messy that the crop
must be removed. After the removal of the old crop, a new crop must be planted.
Due to this practice, cucumber cultivation has traditionally three cycles a year and therefore also three times some weeks without production.
When using a high wire system, the training-wire can be elongated and shifted aside to cope with the continuously growing stem (up to 60 cm a week). This is called the High Wire system. Of course, the continuously growing stems will just as well create a large bunch of stems, but in the high wire system,
the bunches are from de-leaved stems and are at the bottom side of the crop. Therefore, the bunch of stems will be much less messy. This makes that one crop cycle can stay productive for a longer period. Per kg of product this reduces the initial costs for seeds, propagation and planting and it reduces the number of weeks without production.
