A touch too green for a greenhouse

Chocolate Cherry, Amish Paste (in the middle slot), sulky side shoots and a cucumber.

I had been putting it off for a while (again) but this weekend, with some unexpectedly dry (although generally dull and overcast for the most part) weather on Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday, I finally started the laborious task of cleaning the greenhouses. To be completely honest, it was the need to set up the growbags for the tomatoes and cucumbers that was the driving force behind my spring clean and so I set to and started to clear out the smallest of the greenhouses.

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Cucumber, Early Fortune

This is a record of how long this particular set of seeds took to germinate and how they looked at various stages from first appearance to the development of the first set of true leaves and beyond. I hope this will prove useful.

Variety: Early Fortune (RSC)
Sown indoors: 15th March 2014
First Seedling: 20th March 2014
Germination: 5 days
Germination ratio: 4/4 seeds sown

Another new variety for me which will hopefully produce a decent crop of sweet cucumbers.

Saving the seeds: Wautoma Cucumber method 2 (part 2)

20 precious seeds

With my harvested seed safely floating or soaking in the jar of water by my kitchen sink, there was little I could do but bide my time, twiddle my thumbs and wait to see what happened over the next couple of days.

Two days later and I was ready to drain off the top half of the water, along with any floating and therefore bad seeds. Looking at the jar, there seemed to be an awful lot of debris floating just under the lid but I was relieved to see that a fair amount of seeds had sunk to the bottom. I refilled the jar with water and then put it back on the side for another couple of days.

Saving the seeds: Wautoma Cucumber method 2 (part 1)

Nice and over ripe, ready for seed harvest

Yesterday, as I was busy catching up with all the jobs I couldn’t do on Tuesday because of the power cut, I happened to glance across at the basket in which my greenhouse grown cucumbers were sitting and realised that one of them looked nice and over ripe, having swapped most of its green colour for yellow. I made a mental note to harvest the seeds later and carried on vacuuming.

Saving the seeds: Wautoma Cucumber

Earlier this year I acquired several packets of seeds from The Real Seed Catalogue with the aim of where ever possible, trying to save the seeds produced this year for next years growing season. So with several nice plump cucumbers ready for picking I chose a particularly nice looking specimen and set about removing the seeds.

Having never tried seed saving before, I was a little unsure how to proceed but a friend and fellow grower suggested that I slice one of the cucumbers in half, scoop out the seeds onto a paper plate, cover and leave to dry. Once the flesh surrounding the seeds had dried, I could then remove the seeds themselves and leave them to dry out completely before storing them for use next year.

Cucumber, Wautoma

This is a record of how long this particular set of seeds took to germinate and how they looked at various stages from first appearance to the development of the first set of true leaves and beyond. I hope this will prove useful.

Variety: Wautoma (Real Seed Catalogue)
Sown indoors: 2nd April 2013
First Seedling: 7th April 2013
Germination: 5 days

Newly emerged seedling