I do not grow cukes indoors. I have an HID lighting setup I use for starting plants and for overwintering some, but I gave up long ago on trying to grow high light veggies to harvest under lights. I am certainly not going to say it can't be done, just that I didn't consider it cost effective. It is fun and rewarding in it's own way, but not cost effective. A 400 watt Metal Halide light will properly illuminate about a 3x3 area, and perhaps a 5x5 area with reflective sides around the growing area. I would be growing $50 cukes :) I took my passion for growing under lights into the aquarium hobby and have fresh water planted as well as a salt water reef tank. Those are enough work and are both very efficient at growing lots and lots of algae :) In your case you are using fluorescent lights and these do not have anywhere near the intensity of light that HID lighting does. With HID lighting you can have the lights 3 or more feet above the plants, with floros you want it no more than 6" away from the plants. This effectively reduces the coverage area. At this point I am going to say I think lack of light is your limiting factor and fertilizer isn't a concern. One other thought is what type of cukes are you growing? For indoor you are going to want the so-called greenhouse varieties. You need plants that are gynoecious (all female blooms) and parthenocarpic (do not require pollination). Diva is a variety with both traits. I am going to refer you to the Growing Under Lights forum here at GW. It doesn't seem to get a lot of traffic and I haven't participated there in years, but it is probably frequented by more folks than this forum who can help you understand what is going on with your cukes and what it will take to get a set up that will allow you to grow darn near anything indoors.

Thank you Stellabee! I will try the skim milk and water mix. I really hope it works. It has finally stopped raining and there is no rain in the forecast for another week so I hope this will help the cukes recover.

no insecticides or anything like that. like i said, we did probably have squash borers, but i wasn't sure if the same ones would also kill cucumbers. the incomplete pollination does sound right to me ... it's been extremely warm for weeks on end here and bees have been at a minimum. thanks for all the suggestions!

You can use them and it is worth a try to see if they are acceptable to you. Some like them, some don't. Using slicer cukes for pickles isn't a safety issue, assuming you use a safe recipe, it is a quality issue. Slicing cucumbers make much softer, mushier pickles because of all the extra water they contain. The smaller the pieces you use the softer the pickles. So using them in chunks or spears may give you better results than slices. They can also be more bitter if they are large with a large seed cavity. So coring them may help too. "Air pockets"? Not sure what you mean by that unless you are referring to air pockets in the jars? Many of us prefer to use the abundance of slicing cukes we get to make relishes rather than pickles. That way there is no mushy issues. Check out the many other pickle discussions here for more ideas and more details on why many of us feel slicing cukes don't make good pickles. Dave