I’ve got one cucumber bed that has started to produce. The maturing bed has the GTS mix, among others.
I just planted out the new bed with 3 compact cucumber varieties that are supposed to produce full size fruit with smaller vines. In probably 2 weeks I will interplant the remaining GTS mix inside the new bed where space is available.
Cucumber Harvest
Hands down, no exaggeration, absolute best cucumbers I’ve ever had!
After the post last month we thankfully had a good couple inches of rain over the course of a week. So extremely grateful and the garden went crazy! Still in a moderate drought but not currently bordering on severe. I hadn’t watered since but they were looking sad yesterday so I let them have fifteen or so with the sprinkler. They perked right up and are on track with other plants in the area. Seems like a bit of a delayed harvest on everything due to late planting, cool temps, drought…. All the stuff they are being acclimated to! Looking at my first ripe tomato this week as well. Neighbors who are growing cucumbers and water really regularly (like hours almost every night!) have only harvested seven so far. Lots of vegetative growth, not alot of flowers and they look stressed. Ours? Short in stature but growing, thriving, flowering in abundance. These cucumbers are on it! Thanks to all those who grew and contributed to these phenomenal friends…Wow! Beyond impressive.
Pests, none
Diseases, none
Little sun scald/ dry spot that it overcame
Seed to mature fruit - Around 77 days in total
Action seen -
Night time temps in the forties for the first month.
A drought almost to the severity of D2. Still in D1.
All the normal garden pests of slugs and such.
Powdery Mildew and Blight in the vicinity.
Groundhog, skunk, voles, neighbors cats.
Intense heat wave. Yesterday was 110 F with the index.
Part shade at first with help from Sunflowers and now pretty much full sun all day.
Right on. I’m really glad too.The message of Landrace gardening really resonated with me. I feel the barriers that discourage people from producing their own food at home can totally be eradicated with this missing piece of the puzzle. Most don’t have space, time, conventional currency , abundance of water, or mobility to accomplish gardening according to current standards. Behavioral conditioning, gaining immunity, adapting to extreme temperature variations and pest pressure…fascinating to observe.
I have saved seeds from 7 cucumbers from the GTS grow out among other varieties in the mix. My harvest was terrible. I planted late and the cucumbers had to grow and flower through above 90 temps.
I have another bed flowering now. I may have more to share later.
The second grow out is starting to produce. I think it will do better than the first. I also used mostly bush types.
August 23, 2023
I’ve observed the cucumbers as they have turned green, yellow, orange, and finally brown. After waiting over two weeks for them to get icky, they were still firm! I picked one to see if it was ready. The seeds were big, fat, and settled to the bottom. I processed four more over the weekend. The results were the same. There are more growing in various sizes and states. All looking good, healthy, and firm. Biggest surprise? I ate them after removing the seeds and they were still excellent! I had no idea that would be possible. Cucumbers you can harvest seed from and enjoy the bounty as well? Definite win-win!
QUESTION
Am I correct to view this as full maturity and good to go for seed preservation? In the past I would leave them on the vine until they almost disintegrated. It has been two weeks of extreme heat and they just turned brown and began developing a leathery skin? They are firm even now. Pretty wild. I’ve never seen anything like it.
An absolute success. Still growing super strong and healthy. Usually cucumbers do great for a couple weeks in early Spring and eek out a living till Summer sets in. They produce but the quality is far inferior compared to these.
This project has renewed my love of growing cucumbers.
Thanks again to all. Amazing.
That’s the way I do it. I’m only a 2nd year cucumber grower so I don’t know much. Anyways, I accidentally left my cucumber seeds to ferment for a whole week instead of the normal 2-3 days I normally do. Does anyone think this is ok?
Right on. Thanks! I appreciate your response and hearing that has been your experience as well.
I’ve totally done the same thing with tomato seeds. Easy to do when there is alot going on. When the temp was cooler it was okay. Once I forgot them over a hot spell and they were all sprouted floating at the top of the jar!
I looked up details and sounds like it’s OK for up to 4 days but seed quality deteriorates after that, but not terribly. However there are other things beyond germination rate that the following studies don’t measure, Dr White says anything that changes the original plant-deposited microbes on the seed coat isn’t ideal for overall plant health. For example something like fermentation might be better for germination but lose microbes that do something useful like disease resistance or fungal relationships or N fixing. Recommend that course for anyone wondering about post harvest seed practices.
Below are the cucurbit references I found.
“Fermentation for up to four days at 25°C adequately separated seeds from pulp for cleaning, without adversely affecting the viability of cucumber seeds from this population. However, excess fermentation beyond four days resulted in reduced germination and a slower rate of germination at an optimal temperature (25°C).”
From another paper: “Positive responses to short
fermentation durations (^4 days) occasionally were observed, but longer fermentation durations were markedly
deleterious under some conditions.”
Also interesting
“Nienhuis and Lower (1981) reported that longer fermentation of cucumber seeds can decrease the germination percent and rate. Examining the relationship between fruit age at harvest and fermen-tation in melon, cucumber and watermelon, Edwards et al. (1986) and Nerson (1991) noted that germination of seeds from fully-ripe fruits was not affected by fermen-tation. The authors showed that fermentation increased the germination percent of immature seeds from cucumber, melon, and watermelon, whereas this decreased in squash.”
Interesting, I used to not ferment any seeds including those kinds that fermenting saves a lot of time. I suspected it had negative effects like you mentioned. I’ll have to go back to mechanically separating and air drying.
I selected from the Japanese cucumber side of the cross that I did using this landrace this year. I would love to donate some seeds back to your stock that have the large Japanese genetics in them.
My second cucumber attempt this year is producing well in very hot temperatures. It’s also mostly a small grex of bush types. I am very excited about the future possibilities on this one.
This is my harvest from a 19 x 4 bed planted July 9th and harvested today: 63 days. This period of time, the average day temps were in the 90’s and average night temps were in the 70’s.
I picked only a few fruits to eat during this time so what you see is most of what produced. Is this a good harvest or bad? I’ve only got 2 cucumber seasons under my belt so not sure what to expect.
Eventually, I would like to do a cucumber eating bed and a separate bed for cucumber seed production. I think that will give me a lot more food. I don’t want to save seeds from cucumbers that were produced later in the season like most people because I think that reduces time to maturity quality in the selection process.
The smaller group of yellow cucumbers will not get their seeds saved. They were forming some type of white film on the outside. I kept them in the bed to the last moment just in case I didn’t get enough seed to select from. I think I have enough seed to select from better fruits.
I was going to let the rest of these cucumbers go to full maturity but I really need to use this space to grow some kind of fall crop. I have grown impatient. I think I received most of the benefit I was going to eventually get anyways.
Also, several fruits grew in clusters right next to the base of the plant. This is highly desirable for me. I love small plants that produce good.
To restate, these cucumbers grew in high temps when many other plants struggled. They kept the bees happy to the last minute. I really gave the bees a bad day. They were interested in the plants even as I was pulling them up.
