This year I decided to put on my green thumb. We live in a small apartment with a balcony, so I purchased several planters and got to work. There are now four cucumber plants growing in one planter not nearly big enough to hold them. I added a trellis, and the vines are growing on it every which way. By now I’m sure you can tell that I really don’t know what I’m doing.
About three weeks ago, I noticed what looked like tiny little cucumbers growing on my plants. But they were shriveled up and clearly dying. I finally started researching cucumber plants online and realized that cucumbers have to be pollinated in order to fruit. In a perfect gardening world, little bees would land on my cucumber plants. They’d visit the male flowers and get pollen stuck to their little bee legs. Then they’d fly to the female flowers and in the process, leave the male pollen there. Only, it wasn’t happening. Well, one bee made it up to my balcony. Because I had one large, juicy, delicious, lone cucumber growing. Just one. The solution? Hand-pollination.
Hand pollinating your cucumber plants is pretty simple. The female flowers are all by themselves and are growing at the tip of a mini cucumber. The male flowers hang out in clusters. Take a Q-tip (or a paintbrush) and brush it inside a male flower. The pollen will stick right to the Q-tip, and the tip should be yellow. Then place it gently inside the female flower and brush the inside. That’s it!
Some photos of the process:
8 Comments
Great and interesting information! Thank you! Not that I am growing cucumbers or any vegetables right now (although I would love to do that), but planting always fascinates me. I have indoors succulent plants and I enjoy taking care of them and seeing them grow!
We also have succulents growing, but I have them on the balcony right now. Did you see my “toyarrium” post?
What a unique way to deal with the pollination issue for cucumbers! Maybe I will have to give this a try – last time I tried to do cucumbers, they failed miserably! 🙂
What an interesting idea and I love the great way you photoed the process. Btw thanks for the pointer about the succulents for the balcony, that’s one thing I want to do as well starting this year.
This reminds me of my Grandfather, he loves veggies, we got like 2 gardens on our house. Thank you for this. I’ve learned a lot.
This is awesome. I plan to start a garden once I move. I will definitely be bookmarking this post to return to in the future.
Who needs bees when you can do this manually yourself?! 🙂 Love this and it’s inspiring me to grow my own cucumbers too. My dad loves eating them in everything.
Great information. We could have done this with our garden back in Maine!