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.