How to Hand Pollinate Cucumber Plants – Local expert (2024)

FAQs

How to Hand Pollinate Cucumber Plants – Local expert? ›

Grab a paintbrush or a cotton swab (make sure it's clean!). Find a new, fresh, male flower, and dip the tip of your brush inside. Gently twist, ensuring the bristles come in contact with the centre of the flower. Once you remove your bush, you should see little specs of yellow pollen at the end.

The time of day matters: you should always pollinate in the early morning. This is because many flowers, including those of cucumber plants, tend to be more receptive to pollination during the cooler and more humid hours of the morning.

Cucumber flowers are not very attractive to native bees, so honey bees are the most important pollinator in commercial pickling cucumber fields, accounting for 98% of bee visits to cucumber flowers. Honey bees visit flowers for two reasons: pollen for protein, and nectar for carbohydrates.

Hand-pollination is often done with a cotton swab or small brush, but can also be done by removing the petals from a male flower and brushing it against the stigmas of female flowers, or by simply shaking flowers in the case of bisexual flowers, such as tomatoes.

This allows insects to easily cross-pollinate while seeking nectar at the pollen tube. This phenomenon is also known as heterostyly. Many plants, such as cucumbers, have male and female flowers located on different parts of the plant, thus making self-pollination difficult.

See the immature fruit at the base, a clear indication of a female flower. This one has probably already been pollinated and the flower is starting to close.

You have planted seeds and watched them grow and produce their first flowers. Finally, you begin to see your first cucumber fruits. Cucumber fruits begin very tiny but grow quickly. A fertilized female flower takes approximately 7 to 12 days to produce ripe fruit.

However, if you see the female flowers on your cucumber plants, but they are not "setting" fruit, then the problem may be that you do not have pollinators. In the past several years we have had various problems affecting the honey bee populations. However, bumblebees are good pollinators for these plants.

You can also try to attract bees to your garden by sowing pollinator-friendly flowers like borage or alyssum right in your vegetable garden. Or, if those options don't work, you can take action yourself and hand-pollinate.

What fertilizer do cucumbers prefer? ›

However, as soon as the first flowers start to appear the cucumber plant requires a higher level of potassium to encourage further flowering and subsequent fruiting. A high potassium fertiliser, such as tomato feed or a balanced fertiliser mix including potassium can be used as per the instructions.

Most cucumber varieties are monoecious with unisexual flowers—have separate male and female flowers within the same individual— and thus require animal pollination for reproduction. However, some varieties are mostly or totally gynoecious (produce only female flowers) and can produce fruit through parthenocarpy.

This lack of pollination results in either the fruit aborting (no fruit at all) or only developing partially around the seeds that did become fertilized, producing a small malformed fruit. Researchers have found that it takes at least eight honeybee visits per flower to pollinate cucumbers and/or squash adequately.

Answer: There are several possible reasons that your cucumbers are suffering from blossom drop before fruit set. These include pollination issues, environmental stresses, and soil nutrient problems.