Well, you may have not ever seen or heard this kind of thing before. For your information, it's true. Usually the Sweet Cucumber people usually talk about is a species of it's own. This sweet cucumber is not found in the shopping malls or markets. But what I'm about to show you now is the common cucumber or the cucumber we usually find in markets for cheap prices:
As the cucumber shown above, most of you should know what species it is. This is a normal common cucumber which is grown by me. But how do you make it sweet?
Okay, here's something I would really like to share with you if you are interested in eating sweet cucumbers. This is an experiment I did to find out this thing.
First, I referred to the first step to how you get a cucumber from it's vine- pollination. Pollination is the main factor the Cucurbita Family gets it's fruits. Cucurbitas consist of cucumber, pumpkins, squashes and gourds. Pollination is when a male flower's pollen is dusted or it touches the stigma of a female flower. Okay, this may sound confusing but the most important part is to identify a male and female flower, here is a photo:
Male flowers
Female and male flower comparison
Females have a small cucumber below the flower which is known as the ovary. The stigma of the female is right in the flower and the anther of the male is also inside the flower, The anther contains pollen while the stigma waits for the pollen to go on it.
Pollination is commonly done by bees for thousands of years. Flowers and bees help each other to survive until now. But if you are lack of bees and pollinators or you want Sweet Cucumbers, you can hand-pollinate them. This is the first step, there's one more.
Hand-pollination is very easy. You just need a male and female flower. After pollination, the female turns into the fruit we eat and the male is not needed and can be discarded. When doing hand-pollination, you may use a clean smaller paint brush or just by doing this, please check out the link.Pollination of Cucumbers. To summarise it, just brush pollen from the male into the female flower.
This is exactly how you get the sweet cucumber. The more pollen the female flower gets the sweeter and better it will be. The next factor is the right time to harvest the cucumber. This is when you see the cucumber leave it's spines and start to develop the sandy green skin. This is just the right time to harvest, here's a very good example of my sweet cucumber:
And lastly, the environment the cucumber is living in. The environment must be sunny, less weeds or plants that it may compete with, and adequate water for the plant. All you can do to reduce the stress in the plant. If the plant is in stress the fruits will grow to become sour. So it's good to do some talking to the plant like how I do to talk to it sometimes and encouragement. In my beliefs, plants have feelings but very very low conciousness, but they still have feelings. So spend some time and talk to it about good stuff.
So that's all for today on how to get sweet cucumber.
Thank you very much for reading this.
Your acknowledgement about this is very much appreciated by me!
GOOD GARDENING!!!!
