Cucumber cure
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Are you wondering why your cucumbers have lots of foliage and are loaded with flowers, but the flowers keep falling off before they can turn into cucumbers? After all, you’ve kept them well watered and the soil seems to be moist. There are plenty of bees to do the pollinating and you’ve treated them with a good balanced fertilizer. So what can you do to solve this problem?
Cucumbers produce separate male and female flowers on the same plant. Normally, the male flower blooms a little in advance of the female and is then ready to pollinate the female. Often, in extremely hot weather, the male flower will finish blooming before the female flower is ready to receive pollen. However, since flowers are produced randomly throughout the summer, the odds are that some fruit will be produced later, however the yield will be reduced significantly. Another reason that flowers sometimes fail in extreme summer heat is an infestation of thrips in the blooms. Check your flowers carefully for these tiny, slender, slithery insects. A heavy infestation will cause leaves to curl and turn brown. If your cucumbers are infected, treat with Safer’s soap. |
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