Cucumber project
2022-06-09T07:00:00Z
It doesn’t look like much (yet), but I just planted 36 cucumber seeds in this mostly flame-weeded bed. There are 13 varieties, including a grex of 8 varieties, seeds of two varieties that I grew and saved a couple of years ago, one purchased heirloom variety, and two varieties donated by a friend, one of which is actually an Armenian cucumber, a totally different species that may or may not cross with the regular cukes. Can’t wait to see what will happen!
Cucumber project part 2
One week later, after a couple of rainy days, 11 of the 36 seeds have germinated, and 10 of them look healthy. The weeds have also come back in force! If I don’t get more germination in the next few days, I think I’ll try planting some more seeds just so I have more to work with.
20 cucumbers now germinated and all doing well. Planted another 16 seeds to replace the 16 that failed to germinate.
2022-07-14T07:00:00Z
Cucumbers (and weeds) are all doing well. After the second round of seeding, I now have 28 plants growing. Only the Armenian cucumber is flowering (see third picture). If the others don’t catch up, they won’t have a chance to cross-pollinate with it. Fortunately, it produces male and female flowers on each plant, so at least I should get some fruit from it.
Photo #3 - Armenian cuke with flowers. (At least I’m assuming it’s the Armenian cuke because the leaves are a different shape and it’s flowering ahead of the others.)
Two of the plants are now producing fruit! Both are delicious. I’ve marked one of each to let them grow to maturity on the vines; the others are getting eaten as fast as they appear. A few other plants now have tiny fruits as well.
Lots of leaves, not so much fruit
2022-10-01T07:00:00Z
It’s the end of the season already! From 28 plants of 13 varieties, I harvested 9 cucumbers for seed, and there are three or four more still ripening on the vines (see one below, on an almost-dead plant). We ate about 8 others (all good). That’s a pretty poor rate of production, even for a first-year landrace. I’m not sure how many of the plants produced fruit - I didn’t do a good enough job of keeping them separated, and they all got tangled up with each other. But it had to be close to 9, because the cucumbers I harvested were from all along the length of the bed.
The good thing is that this first selection was from a very stressful year, with two months of drought and heat followed by torrential rains. Also, a groundhog got into the garden and gnawed on the cucumber plants as well as lots of other vegetables. So at least I’ve got some drought-resistant (and groundhog-resistant) genes in there. We never got the fungal diseases that usually attack around the end of July; I’ll have to start selecting for resistance to those next year.
Anna M
it’s nice that only some of your major problems surfaced in the first year. If you’d had fungal pressure too, you might not have gotten anything. Looks like you got some lemon types and some green slicers. I’ve found the lemons are the most resilient in my climate. I harvested one that was almost a pound the other day!
Mash Z
Some of those that did best were more light-skinned than the cukes I usually grow, but I wouldn’t call any of them lemony, in terms of taste, anyway.
