Cucumbers: Six Things You May Not Know
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Think you know cucumbers? Here are six things you may not know.
Sustainable Gardening. To help ensure proper pollination of cucumbers and other fruiting crops, encourage populations of beneficial pollinators, and utilize surrounding areas by having plants that will provide food and habitat for beneficial insects. Flowering plants with a high sugar content in their nectar often support adult beneficial insects and butterflies. Consider also plants with abundant small flowers from the mint or aster families, favorites for native bees.
Saving Cucumber Seeds. Cucumbers can cross pollinate with any other cucumber varieties, up to a 1/2 mile away from your garden. Therefore, home gardeners do not usually save cucumber seeds. If cucumber varieties can be isolated by distance, or through bagging and hand pollination, cucumber seeds can be easily saved. Seeds must be selected from a fruit at a much more mature stage than normally eaten, and may turn white, yellow, or orange. Seeds are processed using a wet fermentation technique similar to tomato seeds in order to breakdown anti-sprouting enzymes present on the cucumber seeds. See The GardenZeus Guide to Saving Tomato Seeds for information on how to save tomato seeds.
Biointensive Gardening. Biointensive gardeners can plant cucumbers 6 inches apart along a trellis if soil is conditioned well with plenty of compost to support intensive growth.
Modifying Cucumber Flavor. Cool temperatures can enhance bitterness, but fertilization practices, plant spacing, and watering frequency have exhibited little consistent effect on the number of bitter cucumbers produced. Varieties vary widely in their tendency to be bitter.
Fun With Children. Consider growing Dragon’s Egg cucumbers for a fun yet edible activity with children. These non-bitter cucumbers are white to very light green and look very similar to large eggs. Plant Dragon’s Eggs and encourage your children to help you harvest by hunting for eggs!
Try Cucuamelons! Mexican Sour Gherkins (Melothria scabra), or cucamelons look like grape-sized watermelons, but are grown like cucumbers and taste like cucumbers with a twist of lime. See Cucamelons: Planting, Maintaining, Harvesting and Use
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Other articles of interest:
Growing Cucumbers in the California Home Garden
Getting to Know Cucumbers Part 1 of 3: Two Basic Cucumber Decisions