Cucumber is one of the vegetable plants that fascinated me much in the process of planting. My first cuke plant is Cucumber Marketer. It started to bloom about twenty male flowers for about a week or so before the female flowers came out.
At first it sets in only one female flower a day and after about a week, two or three.
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| First day of blooming - Female Flower |
I had hand-pollinated at least 18 female cukes and at first it seemes that they're starting to swell up but then after a while I noticed that they stopped growing, especially after getting soaked from a downpour or suffered from a sun-scorching day. I then started to move them to a shade during the scorching noon and afternoon in order to protect the pollinated female flowers and the leaves from getting sunburnt.
One day as I was going to pollinate a female flower, I found this one survived, but only this one which was growing... fast. In days it got this big.
So what happened with the others...?
I harvested the cuke after it got about 13 cm long and about 6 cm wide.
It's stout and fleshy with few seeds but the size and form was not like the one shown in the seeds catalog which is longer and not as stumpy as this was. The taste was a bit bland and not as sweet and crunchy as the local breed. I wonder if it's a little too ripe as I had already seen a little crack on the lower skin.
After several days after the harvest, I got some new blooms and had them pollinated but again only one got succeeded. I wonder why I can't have several cukes succeededly pollinated at the same time? Does the plant automatically abort other baby cukes because it has not enough energy for all of them since I plant it in a 4 gallons container? (shoulders shrugged and eyes rolled)
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