GardenCucumber variety
Excelsior Cucumber
✓ In your garden
Excelsior is a pickling cucumber, ready in about 50 days. It’s bred for pickling — small and crisp — and fine fresh when picked young. Cucumbers are warm-season and thirsty — plant after frost, keep them watered, and pick often to keep them coming.
“A small, crisp cucumber bred for the pickle jar.”
Growing basics — shared by every cucumber
Excelsior grows like any other cucumber. The full picture — how deep to plant, spacing, feeding, pests, harvest — lives on the Cucumber page so it's maintained in one place.
- Sun
- Full Sun
- Spacing (in row)
- 8–12 in
- Row spacing
- 48–72 in
- Planting depth
- 0.5–1 in
- Soil pH
- 6–6.5
- Water
- Moderate
What is Excelsior good for?
- PicklingThis is the job — pick them small. Great
- Fresh & saladsFine young; best used for pickles. Skip it
- Slicing thickToo small and seedy for big slices. Skip it
From how it grows — kitchens vary.
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Want the full 10/50/90% odds + nearest stations? Open the frost tool →When to plant Excelsior in your zone
Zone 6bGreenhouse or cover on: your start slides ~4 weeks earlier and your harvest stretches ~3 weeks later (shown striped).
Planting seeds straight in the ground only works where the season's long and warm — most gardeners start seeds indoors or buy young plants, or you'd pick your first tomato right as frost hits.
Comfortable — first ripe fruit lands around early May, well before your typical frost (~late Oct).
- Start seeds indoors
- mid Mar – mid Mar
- Picking
- early May until frost (~late Oct)
Typical dates for zone 6b — set your zone or ZIP above for yours.
Growing Excelsior — the things that trip people up
- Pick often and pick young. A cucumber left on the vine turns big, seedy, and bitter, and it tells the plant to stop making more — so harvest every day or two at peak.
- Give it a trellis. Vining cucumbers climb, which saves space, keeps the fruit clean and straight, and cuts down on disease.
Excelsior cucumber at a glance
| Type | Pickling |
|---|---|
| Grows as | Tall vine (indeterminate) |
| Days to ripe | 50 days after you plant it outside |
| Color | Green |
Extra fields from seed-catalog listings and university growing guides. Days to ripe and disease resistance shift with your climate and seed source — double-check with your local extension office before you buy.
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Common questions about Excelsior
How long does Excelsior take to grow?
About 50 days from sowing to the first pick, then it keeps producing for weeks if you keep picking.
Is Excelsior for slicing or pickling?
It’s a pickling cucumber — small and crisp for the jar, and edible fresh when young.
Does Excelsior need a trellis?
It does best on a trellis: climbing keeps the fruit straight and clean and improves airflow.
Browse more cucumber varieties →