DOUBLE Your CUCUMBERS, SQUASH And MELONS With This Simple Trick!

what's growing on gardeners it's Tuesday June 11th and the summer harvests are starting to roll in here on the Southeastern coast of North Carolina are you growing cucurbits in your garden like cucumbers zucchini squash and melons but you are struggling to get good harvests or even worse the little baby fruits are turning yellow drying up and falling off the plant well this is the video for you because I'm going to show you how to stop that completely this one little trick can double your Harvest maybe even more if you're new to the Channel Please Subscribe and hit the Bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon store and spread shop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated the cuer bit family of vegetables include common vegetables we grow in our annual vegetable gardens like cucumbers your squashes like zucchini pumpkin Butternut summer squash Etc melons like watermelon cantaloupe honeydew Etc and your gourds because these plants are all in the same family the overwhelming majority of cucurbits like similar growing conditions and they live pretty closely by the same rules one of that being pollination requirements but before I discuss cucurbit pollination I want to start with a simpler example these right here are flowers off of a tomato plant and tomatoes are part of the nightshade family now your nightshades like your Tomatoes your peppers and your eggplant they have all all of the male and female sex organs enclosed in a single flower so all you need to pollinate a Nightshade is Just Wind because the male and female sex organs are enclosed in the same flow every time they get a breeze it shakes up the pollen within that flow and then the pollen coats the female sex organs and then you get fertilization and you get a fruit it is that simple cucurbits are different the male and female sex organs are located on different flowers yes they have both male flowers and female flowers flowers the overwhelming majority of cucurbits are manous meaning they produce both male flowers and female flowers and the only way that a fruit can set and hold until maturity is if pollen is carried from the male flour to the female flour now generally that is done by pollinating insects so if you want fertilization and mature fruit then something has to carry that pollen from the male flow to the female flour simple wind will not get it done the overwhelming variet of cucurbits are manous which means they have this requirement now these plants are self fertile meaning you only need one plant and that one plant will provide both male flowers and female flowers but if cross-pollination between the male flower and the female flowers do not happen then your fruits are going to abort let me show you what I'm talking about what you see right here is a zucchini plant which of course is a type of squash and it is a typical manous variety that has both male and female flowers that require cross pollination now what you see right here is a male flower how do you know it's male well it's because it is a standalone flow there is no fruit attached it's just a flower with a stem and if I were to peel back these petals what I would find is the male pollen inside this right here was a female flow a female flour on a zucchini plant and all cucurbits is a little baby fruit that then has a flower attached to it and in order for this fruit to become fertilized pollen has to transfer from the male flour to the female flour now this was successful the pollinators did it for me and that is because the flower dropped off the end of this baby fruit but as you can see the fruit still persists so because pollination was successful this is going to hold until maturity and eventually that will turn into a ripe fruit like you see right there now what would happen if you didn't have successful pollination well you would wind up with what you see right here this was also a female flower you can see it is a baby zucchini squash that has a flower tip on the end well this clearly did not have successful cross-pollination and we know that because it is starting to shrivel up it is turning yellow and soon it will abort now all I had to have done to guarantee pollination would be to take a blush brush and then just open up this flower or I could just peel the flower away exposing the male pollen and then snapping this off like you see right here and just rolling it inside the female flow that would have given me pollination but I failed to do that I let the pollinators do the work for me and pollination is not 100% when you rely on nature unfortunately so now what I have to do is I have to wait for these two baby female flowers right here uh for the flowers to become large enough and open enough that they will accept pollen so that's probably going to happen in about 2 to 3 days so I need to keep an eye on this fruit right here and this fruit right there if I manually pollinate it it will guarantee that they will set fruit and that is the problem that many of you are having when you see your baby fruits shriveling and falling off it's a simple lack of pollination so to put things in perspective for many of you I have a pretty welldeveloped Garden I've spent the past 6 and 1/2 years building out my entire yard to be a paradise for pollinators with fruit trees and Flow all over the place and I live on the east coast which is fairly Lush and green full of insect life and as a result my yard is teaming with all types of pollinators and still despite all of the pollinators in my yard they still miss things they're still not completely pollinating my zucchini and my cucumbers and my melons and such so if you don't have as many pollinators in your yard it's going to be even worse for you so a lot of you do live in areas that struggle with pollen Ator population so I can almost guarantee that if you're having production issues with your cucumbers your zucchini your other squashes and melons it's probably because of inadequate pollination and the only way around that for the most part is to hand pollinate yourself and I will show you how to do that on other example plants now what you see right here is a watermelon vine and this is a fantastic example of male and female flowers this right here is a male watermelon flow and again you know it is a male flour because there is no fruit attached this right here is a female watermelon flour it has a little baby watermelon right here and this dried up nub that you see right here was the flower now luckily Mother Nature did the work for me this was clearly visited by bees because that flower is shriveling up but the fruit looks great so this is going to hold and eventually turn into a ripe mature melon as long as some rat or raccoon or squirrel or something else doesn't come along and pluck it off this right here is a mini melon called lemon drop and here you can see a female flour again you know it's a female flow because there is a baby melon attached to it here and then this flower right here is in its prime it is wide open to accept pollen now down here we see a male flour and we know this is a male flow because there is no baby melon attached so all we have to do is peel back the Petals of this male flow and what you will see is male pollen so I'm going to take a blush brush or whatever kind of makeup brush this is I'm not an expert in the makeup realm folks but you take this and then you rub the male flour and you collect all of that pollen and then you simply deposit that into the female flour or alternatively you could simply snap this male flow off and then peel back the petals and then take it and then rub it inside all of the female flowers and that right there will virtually guarantee pollination that will virtually guarantee that this little tiny baby melon right here becomes fertilized and then persists on the vine and then eventually weeks or months from now I will have a nice ripe fruit and the end goal is for that little baby melon right there to turn into one of those that is a melon that has been clearly fertilized ized and it is maturing on the vine and I'm probably only weeks away from my first lemon drop Harvest of the season and of course this also holds true if you are growing typical manous varieties of cucumbers the cucumber plant that you see right in front of you is suo long and it is a manous cucumber you can see big clusters of male flowers right here and also clusters of male flowers up here and over here there is one lone female flower a baby cucumber with a flower attached and of course of course if we want to make sure that this was pollinated we would want to take cucumber pollen from the male flour and we would want to transfer it to this female flour now this female flour in reality has already started to crisp up so I am pretty confident that that has already been pollinated but just in case that's a good way you can be sure so for those of you that are growing typical manous varieties of cucurbits which is going to be virtually every single one of you because almost all variety I of cucumbers squash and melons that are commonly and readily available are manous this is the procedure that is going to be a GameChanger for you if you aren't out there manually hand pollinating I don't care how many pollinators there are in your location nature is never 100% so you are not getting 100% pollination if all you're doing is relying on bees and other insects so if you do this procedure you are going to dramatically increase your fruit load and for those of you that live in pollinator poor areas this could double triple quadruple quintuple your Harvest if you don't get good pollination you could go from 10 to 20% pollination to 90 to 100% so we're talking absolutely dramatic boosts to your fruit set now throughout this video I keep putting the qualifier manous manous manous in front of everything well is there any way around this procedure are there any cucurbits that are not manous are there other Alternatives so we don't have to do this procedure well I'm glad you asked there are some varieties of cucurbits that are ganous which means they only produce female flowers and if you do this properly this is a way that you could dramatically increase your Harvest this variety of cucumber right here is called early Prince it does not waste any energy at all growing male flowers it produces 100% female flowers every single flower up and down this plant is female so if pollination is there you will get incredible yields off of this Vine more than standard manous varieties however there is a downside standard ganous cucurbit varieties are not self-fertile so if all you plant are ganous varieties of cucumbers or any other cucurbit you're only going to have female flowers in your garden you're not going to have any male flowers so there won't be any pollination and the fruits will all drop off with 100% accuracy so you'll have no har at all so if you're going to grow ganous cucumbers or other kinds of cucurbits that only have female flowers you have to grow other varieties that have male flowers nearby so there can be pollen in the general area for pollinators or for you to perform the hand pollinating procedure with so this variety is called bait Alpha it has both male and female flowers I specifically planted this next to the early Prince so we could transfer the pollen from bait Alpha to the early prints so basically if I were to take any of the mature ripe cucumbers like what you see right here and I were to plant the seed all of the seeds inside of this cucumber would be some kind of hybrid cross between the early Prince variety and the bait Alpha variety or whatever other variety you are using as a pollinator so because of that none of these varieties are going to grow true to type if you save this seed every individual seed inside this cucumber will be a random plant but even better yet gaining popularity throughout the marketplace are parthenocarpic varieties of cucurbits now parthenocarpic simply means that a fruit will persist on the vine without pollination you don't need to fertilize it there needs to be no pollen transfer and it will still hold and persist to maturity so there are lots of different varieties of parthan a carpet cucumbers that are on the market right now both manous varieties that have both male and female flowers and ganous varieties that have only female flowers so the Holy Grail right now are ganous parthenocarpic varieties of cucumbers so if you're growing these parthenocarpic ganous varieties of cucurbits they will make Almost 100% female flowers and they will hold their fruit with almost 100% success as long as your environmental conditions are correct and your stress levels and your growing conditions aren't so high that it causes the individual flowers and fruits to drop off and the great thing about this is this is in GMO or anything like that parthenocarpy is a somewhat rare but still fairly common natural condition in a lot of fruits so all breeders are doing is they are taking known parthenocarpic varieties and they are crossing them with other types of cucumbers or other cucurbits that they want and then a certain percentage of that offspring are going to hold onto that genetic Al so it's totally natural it is what happens in nature it is just cross-pollination so here I have a few ganish parthenocarpic varieties of cucumbers I have a plant called Merlin that you see right here this makes 100% female flowers and all of the fruits for the most part are going to persist right next to it is party time that is another that is another ganous parthenocarpic variety all the baby fruits for the most part are going to persist I'll link to a video above that goes in depth about all these different varieties but man this has really increased my cucumber production growing these and a question many of you asked me about the parthenocarpic varieties is do they make seeds well if all you are growing are gous parthenocarpic varieties and there are no female flowers anywhere then no they are not going to make seeds at all if you were to cut this cucumber fruit open in the absence of pollination the endocarps inside will be Hollow they will be Hollow seed cavities so there will be no seeds if there is no pollination now if you're growing other varieties of cucumbers nearby like I am that have male flowers if there is male pollen transfer from one of those varieties to these parthenocarpic varieties then you will get seed and every single individual seed will be a unique hybrid cross if you plant 100 seeds you're going to get 100 different plants but they'll be pretty much similar just like um if two parents have 10 different kids they're all going to be genetically similar but they will be different so they'll all be basically F1 hybrids then there are old parthenocarpic heirlooms like this China Jade variety that you see right here that make both male and female flowers and what's cool about this is if you were to grow this in isolation and the plant pollinates itself with its own male pollen then if you save the seed every single one of the seeds will grow true to type however if this variety was cross-pollinated with a different one like it was cross-pollinated with that suo long male flower right there Then each individual seed inside the fruit would be a random F1 hybrid so if you're not growing these in isolation generally they don't save seed very well because there's a high degree of cross-pollination you never know what you're going to get well that all sounds well and good for cucumbers but are there other parthenocarpic varieties of cucurbits out there that aren't cucumbers well here is When Things become a little less clear there are an immense number of parthan carpet cucumbers on the market right now if you just Google search parth and a carpet cucumber varieties you'll get a ton of different options but things like your squashes your zucchinis your melons they are a lot less clear and there are less things to pick from uh in fact I just ordered some zucchini that claim to be partially parthenocarpic they are called sure thing hybrid they're in the mail right now I'm going to run an experiment growing them underneath a plant jacket and I'm going to do that because Vine BS and squash bugs are so bad here and in many climates I'm going to take a 20-gallon grow bag I'm going to grow the sure thing hybrid in it and I'm going to put one of those drawring plant jackets that I use to protect my Citrus and avocados that way they will be 100% in isolation and no insects can get in and I'm going to verify if any of the fruits hold in total absence of pollination so I will run that experiment this season um if you're interested in running that own experiment yourself I will drop links to all of these different parth and aaric seeds down in the video description for your convenience but I don't think there is anything that is 100% parth in a car like you can find with the Cucumbers now when it comes to melons like your watermelons honeydew cantaloupe that is even less clear I have not heavily researched that so I would suggest you do your own research type in parthenocarpic melons parthenocarpic squash parthenocarpic zucchini varieties see if you can find any if you want to experiment more but at the end of the day you don't need any fancy varieties of cucurbits to have absolutely massive harvests all you need is cross-pollination from male flour to female flow and now that you have the knowhow and the tools to do so you can do this yourself to have bigger Harvest of cucumbers squashes and melons than you've ever had in your life so everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and please ring that notification Bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these if you're curious about any of the concepts that I outlined in this video please ask the questions down in the comments below I will do my best to address them if you're curious about any of these fancy ganous parth and aaric varieties of cucurbits that I have verified I will place direct links down in the video description for your convenience and I'll also Place links to everything I use in real life down in the video description in my Amazon storefront so expand the video description click on the Amazon link you'll see everything I use in real life while you're down there check out my spread shop for custom merch if you want to support the channel thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video oh boy daily the Gators are out today there's a big guy swimming in the pond right there look at him go so cool that's a big boy right there it's hard to see but there's another Gator all the way back there can't really make the gator out on the phone but you can make them out with your eyes nice day to go gator hunting come on Dale we have a nice little holiday weekend ahead of us let's go for our walk

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 36,956

Keywords: cucumbers, squash, melons, growing cucumbers, growing cucurbits, how to grow cucumbers, how to grow squash, how to grow melons, how to pollinate cucurbits, how to hand pollinate, hand pollinating, parthenocarpic, cucurbits, garden, gardening, vegetable garden, fruit trees, organic gardening, gardening tips, garden tips, gardening tips and tricks, gardening hacks, garden hacks, edible landscaping, growing, plants, vegetables, how to, diy, millennial gardener, the millennial gardener

Id: 7ojJy13PqSQ

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024