Leaves at top seem to be OK

So is that yellowing going to spread to all the leaves and kill the plant eventually? The production has dropped, there are less cukes on the plant and they are not growing as fast.

Also after rains the flowers seem to shrivel/rot/die. Is this a different disease, same problem as yellowing leaves? What are these problems and is there something I can do to improve the health of the plant?

Thanks as always for the help.

Josh

You would probably do best to pull out the cucumbers and focus on keeping the rest of the plants healthy.

Athenian .. All my cukes (in two separate locations separated by about 30 ft) have this same problem .. So if they are dying, I will enjoy whatever few cukes are left and think about getting more disease resistant type next year :(

I haven't grown a lot of vegs in containers, but of the cukes I have in the ground the oldest leaves on the slicer are getting not yellow but sort of dried looking, and it is cooler so the production is dropping a bit. I expect this to continue until frost. The pickler was a "bush" variety, and it seems to have just reached a stopping point and is kind of giving up. That's okay, I have enough pickles.

Not sure about the brown flowers. There are some mildews that attack cucumbers, but you don't have any of the leaf symptoms. (The leaves would get more and more spotty-brown, and you could see the spore cases on the underneath side) Did you let them get a bit too dry once, and the those flowers aborted? That can happen. If it got really dry for a long time, then the roots can get damaged and the plant can't really recover that well from that. Seems like you would have more crispy leaf damage in that case.

Really though, cukes don't seem to last forever, like greenman said. Did you get a good harvest? I could see you still had a cuke on your plant.

Be happy you got something. The dreaded 'powdery mildew' got all mine along with earwigs which has been an unusually high problem this year with the lack of rain all summer, then high humidity, then very dry weather. It has been a killer for mine. The mold spores are very high and everyone I know growing cukes lost theirs to the same thing.
Now, if your cukes died from some sort of disease, then I would suggest you pull them out and burn them or toss them away, far away. Rake that area very well and do not plant them in the same location next year.
if you do, them make sure to take a leaf or two to your local nursery at first onset and get treatment for it before it happens again.

Mike

Mike:
The summer didn't seem that different this year in new england .. (though there were spells of humid air, dry weather, high heat etc). So Cukes are not expected to produce until fall? We are 2/3rds into the summer. I was hoping to get another month of cukes :)

I think that what I have resembles gray mold. ( botrytis mold ) I saw a stem legion on couple of plants :(
Here is a closer picture of one of the cucumber flowers ..

I spent a few hours removing all the gray mold from cukes at one location. (Left the cukes at the second location as they were for control and because it was taking way too much time). Continued to monitor and remove gray mold daily for next week. Cuke plants are doing much better. There are lots of new cuke flowers. Funny thing is though there are very few male flowers, so hand pollinating has become very difficult. There is less than one male flower per two female flowers. I am guessing that gray mold attacks male flowers more easily and I removed most of those to remove the gray mold!
The location where I did not remove the mold, the leaves have further yellowed and the cukes are pretty much dead.

Lessons for next year: reduce the crowding and watch and remove such mold as soon as it appears.