5 Reasons Cucumbers Become Deformed or Misshapen

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener channel now this is an odd question that we get asked quite a bit and it's luke why do the tips of my cucumbers look super odd and misshapen this one here has got a little bit of a quirkiness to it it's not quite as nice as say this gorgeous cucumber right here now this one got away from me a little bit we had a bunch of rain and it's a little bit bigger but it's still firm so it's not quite not super seedy this would make a really good refrigerator pickle but as you can see that you know the the tip's a little curved it's a little misshapen and in some cases it can kind of get a little soft and uh and mushy so what causes it and how you know what can you do to prevent it so the main cause of this is a pollination issue so when you have a flower there are uh there are female flowers and there are male flowers when it comes to cucurbits these are a cucumber they're a member of the cucurbit family and so there are male and female flowers it's not quite like like a tomato or a pepper where the male and female or sex organs of the flower are combined so when you have a male and a female flower it requires pollen from the male flower to land onto the female flower which is the part that actually contains the fruit and then what happens is if there's good fruit set you have earth there's good pollination you have good fruit set and you can also see this with things like corn if you have corn and you have say like a really rainy day and some of the some of the the corn silks get mold on them or some of the pollen gets moldy and doesn't quite touch each one of those little silks each silk corresponds to a kernel on the cob of corn and so you can also have misshapen corn cobs very much the same way and that's just because of a pollination issue but what can you do to prevent it or what can you know what are some things that that can be done to to give you better success the first way is with hand pollinating now if you can come in and actually use a paint brush or i'll show you a really simple way just using your finger you can actually hand pollinate the flowers because there may be a lack of bees it could be because the weather is too cold or the weather is too hot or maybe because it's been really rainy or cloudy and that can really have an effect on how many pollinators are able to come out and pollinate your crops right now it's a nice beautiful bluebird skies stunning day in the garden today and there's no shortage of bees but this does not surprise me because when we had all that rain and the wind and all the craziness pollinators just don't come out during that weather and so even though we've had great amounts of rain to give us nice beautiful fruits it does not surprise me why we have some misshapen fruits just after that crazy weather so nice cloud it'll only be a second but uh but yeah so it can be a lack of pollinators so come on in here really quick i'm gonna see if i can find some flowers to cross pollinate here and i'll show you what you can do to prevent it so here you have a cucumber and you'll notice there are both male and female flowers here this is a female flower because you can see the little cucumber at the end and this is a male flower as you can see it's just a stem with no fruit what you can do is when the flower is open there you go you can take your finger gather up some of that pollen and you can simply take it and transfer it to the other flower and you can basically play bumblebee now also really helps is crossing plants because the more plants you have the more you're the more pollen you have and the more you're going to get a good fruit set here's another beautiful cucumber but you'll notice the end of it is kind of misshapen but yeah we have i mean we have great pollination we have really good really good fruit sets here and what you'll notice is as the flour dries up it'll dry up and the fruit will remain that's how you know you have a successful fruit set if the flower drops off and the cucumber also drops off that means the pollination was not successful but you know oh coming in here look at this a nice cantaloupe beautiful so that's hand pollinating just in a summary you can do with a paint brush a q-tip your finger doesn't matter just really be gentle but get in there and pollinate those if you don't see many bees because that can be that can be a reason why you have misshapen fruits but in terms of fruit production we don't have any shortage wow very very nice check out this one i just found that's pretty mishapen so what causes that what are some more reasons that can cause that well if it's not a lack of pollinators sometimes the pollen just goes bad this can be because of several reasons so i'm going to break that down into those parts and those are also reasons for misshapen cucumbers so still going to be included in those five the first reason is because the pollen goes sterile because of hot weather if you have really hot weather and and you get weather above 105 degrees that can render some of the pollen sterile it basically kills off the ability for the pollen to to carry its genetic material it essentially uh it essentially kind of deactivates the pollen and sterilizes it so that even if it does touch the female portions of the flower it's kind of just dead so there's no there's not really a viable uh fruit set there so it can because it's too hot it can also be because it's too wet now pollen is very uh it's very sensitive to moisture and if you have a lot of rain what can happen is the pollen can actually mold and if the pollen molds the pollen is just like anything else it goes bad when it molds and that can cause improper fruit set now this can also be caused from disease if your plants have been infected with a cucumber beetle cucumber beetles will they transmit a lot of disease and nasty stuff when they when they start eating your plants if you're noticing cucumber beetles on your plants and they were normally healthy the conditions are just about perfect for growing cucumbers but you're starting to get a lot of deformed fruits that can be because the cucumber beetles like to feast on the flowers first the flowers are the most kind of tender and they also they're the easiest food source for the beetles to start eating if you're noticing little holes in your flowers start showing up it can definitely be because of the of the cucumber cucumber wilt and cucumber wilt also affects the fruits so pests can be another thing but it's most commonly uh it's most commonly the cucumber beetle that that can that's kind of your most common pest that can cause that slugs are another pest as well that do eat cucumber cucumber flowers but generally they don't affect the the flower itself because the pollination you know if the petals are consumed the pollination can still take place this is most likely caused from a cucumber beetle that actually kind of stunts the plant it stunts the growth and that's why the plant overall kind of dies after the course of maybe two or three weeks once it's been infected so it can definitely stunt the plant and if you notice cucumber beetles you're most likely going to notice some some misshapen fruits so that's the third reason the fourth reason that your cucumbers can be misshapen like this is because of a nutrient deficiency now if your plants are really lacking nitrogen what can happen is the cucumbers they take so much energy specifically nitrogen to produce that if you have a lack of nitrogen and your plants are starting to turn yellow what can happen is the plants don't have enough have enough nutrients and energy to form fully fully sized fruits and so what will happen is they actually kind of just stop short they just form what they can and then the rest they kind of just sever off and that's because biologically it might be able to produce a cucumber say this size but if there's only enough nutrients to produce a cucumber this size it will and what you'll notice is that the size that gets fully kind of fully sized if you will it will still have viable seeds inside and that's because the plant is doing its very best to produce offspring it might not be able to produce enough energy to uh to produce say you know 75 seeds and a full-size cucumber it might only have enough nutrients left in the plant or kind of the surrounding soil to produce maybe 10 seeds and that's about as big as 10 seeds is for that fruit and so it's just kind of trying to conserve energy conserve nutrients with what's left and the fifth and final reason why your cucumbers might look like this is because of a lack of water cucumbers are 95 to 97 percent water and so if you're growing something that's that high in water content common sense would say that you need to give them lots of water so if you're just kind of living letting your plants uh go and just kind of letting them succumb to mother nature if it rains it rains if it doesn't it doesn't oh well let's see what we get you're going to end up with a fair amount of fruits like this during the dry season if you continually water what you'll find is that the fruits do fill out and again that does kind of tie back to the nutrient issue where nutrients are uptaked through water and if the plants can't uptake water they also can't uptake nutrients so there is kind of a correlation between the two but also water does tie into just how how much how large the fruits get you'll notice this with with pretty much any fruits if you have tomatoes what they can kind of do is they can kind of turn small hard and cat face with cucumbers they turn misshapen watermelons they'll turn very small kind of pithy and they'll ripen prematurely so this does not this is not exclusive to just cucumbers but it is a very common reason why your cucumbers are misshapen so if you have dry weather in the forecast make sure that you're giving them lots of water cucumbers are definitely one of those crops where you know the more water you can give them uh better the better and there's lots of people that even grow them hydroponically because anything in the cucurbit family is really going to benefit from lots of water so i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new i also do really hope that you try growing some cucumbers if you have not yet already they are a finicky crop don't get me wrong but they are definitely some of the most rewarding things that you can grow just because of the amount of food that they can produce in a small amount of space you can grow them vertically like we are here up this cattle panel trellis and just this year alone we've grown just shy of 70 pounds of cucumbers it has been an exceptional year i'll give you that we don't usually get 70 pounds of cucumbers from you know just about eight plants but that's been this year and i'm not complaining so give them a shot if you've not yet already make sure to check out our complete growing guide for cucumbers if you're interested and also make sure to try different varieties that's the last thing i'd say is if you're not having any luck with say you know a specific variety like maybe it's boston pickling right try a wisconsin smr pickling it's a it's still a pickling cucumber but different genetics sometimes will give you the leg up and will give you better results so just thought i'd throw that in there hopefully you guys enjoyed hopefully you learned something new if you did make sure to throw a like up there subscribe if you're not yet already and we'll catch you all on the next episode grow bigger go home bye look at that cucumber that is a beautiful cucumber just picked it and i gotta be honest this is the prettiest cucumber i've ever grown i am stoked

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 136,750

Rating: 4.9648504 out of 5

Keywords: Premiere_Elements_2018, cucumbers, deformed, five reasons, fruits, garden tip, gardening, growing cucumbers, head, migardener, misshapen, odd shaped, rain, summer, top 5, vine

Id: jGpiV-fM1_w

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021