Collecting quality cucumber seeds

Gardeners buy cucumber seeds from gardening stores. The most delicious and productive varieties are left for cultivation. You can propagate cucumbers by seeds. This method is time consuming, but worth the effort, since you will receive a large amount of planting material. To get quality planting material, you need to follow several rules.

Selection of ripe fruits

To get seeds, fruits are left on cucumber lashes until August. In mid-August, yellow cucumbers are picked.

When picking cucumbers for seeds, pay attention to the stalk of the vegetable. It should dry completely. If the stalk is green, then the seeds have not yet received enough nutrients. Cucumbers with a green stalk are left on the lash until it is completely dry.

Choosing the right seeds

After picking overripe fruits, examine them carefully. It is necessary to extract seeds only from cucumbers with four chambers (tetrahedral). Such fruits are female. Bushes with a good ovary will grow from the seeds of such fruits. Seeds from male fruits will not yield large yields, as they will bloom mainly with male flowers. The male fruits of the cucumber are three-chambered (triangular).

Cut the cucumber fruit. This will help you better distinguish between male and female fruits. You also need to cut off the lateral parts of the female fruit. Bitterness accumulates in the seeds near the stalk. Bitter cucumbers will grow from such seeds.

Preparing seeds for planting

Seeds cucumber are in a transparent shell. This shell deteriorates quickly, which reduces the shelf life of the seeds. In order to get rid of the shell, the seeds are dried in the sun for three days. The remnants of the film can be washed off in warm water. All full-weight seeds will sink to the bottom of the container, and empty ones will float up. All empty seeds must be filtered. Full-weight - collect with a sieve. Then these seeds are dried.

Store seeds in a cool, dark place. It is noticed that if you store seeds for a long time, for several years, then the yield of bushes from such seeds increases significantly.

You need to plant cucumber seeds in the spring. Depending on the variety, the beds are sown in mid-April - late May.

Sign the seed containers and plant only one variety of seeds in the beds, otherwise there is a high risk of over-pollination of cucumbers. If the varieties are dusty, then it will no longer be possible to collect the seeds from their fruits, since a hybrid variety will grow without the possibility of reproduction.