JoAnne Skelly: Why no cucumbers?

I’ve been watching my lemon cucumber plant closely, trying to find developing cucumbers. Until today, there weren’t any fruits setting up. With it being August already, I don’t know if I will have ripe cucumbers before the first frost.

That said, I was excited when I finally discovered a few cucumbers. Hopefully, there will be a long enough growing season for them to ripen into an edible size. I wondered why there weren’t any cucumbers sooner even though I had lots of flowers.

Most cucumbers have separate male and female flowers on the same plant. This is called monecious. The flowers look alike, although the female flower is smaller. The female flowers also have a tiny little bump of a cucumber shape behind the flower. I suppose my plant started out with plenty of male flowers but few female flowers. Perhaps now, the female flowers have caught up and there will an abundant transfer of pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers to yield delicious fruit. It might be iffy though, because the female flowers only open for a day.

Pollinators have to transfer the pollen from the male flower to the female flower for fertilization/pollination to occur. Until my oregano plants started blooming recently, I hadn’t seen many bees.

I suppose I could have tried hand pollination and become the pollinator myself. I could find the male flower with its thin straight stems, insert a small clean brush, or a Q-tip into the center, and gather up some pollen.

Then, I would have to find a female flower, put the brush into it and get the pollen onto the center of the flower. Doing one flower at a time makes this a tedious process.

Insufficient transfer of enough pollen grains during pollination can cause deformed fruit and reduce fruit production. Even the weight of the fruit can be reduced.

Lack of pollination can also cause plants to abort fruit. Insufficient pollination is a problem in the Cucurbit family, which includes squash, zucchini, pumpkins and melons.

Other factors that can reduce pollination include cold rainy weather that reduces bee activity or use of insecticides, which kills pollinators.

We haven’t had any cool wet weather, and I do not use insecticides, so these aren’t the problems. Perhaps an alternative to hand pollination might be to plant timelier pollinator-attracting plants, so I get bees and other pollinators earlier in the season to match up with the timing of the flowers.

Attracting pollinators is always a desirable objective on every level for a gardener.

JoAnne Skelly is Associate Professor & Extension Educator Emerita at University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. Email skellyj@unr.edu.