cucumbers
Posted October 26th, 2008 by Emily
I was just at the Kingston Seed Summit and was very inspired by Raoul’s (and Arvana’s) work. I’m a CSA farmer and I was extremely discouraged by the cucumbers this year. Cucumbers always seem to be a challenge but this year because it was so wet I think there was a large cucumber beetle population. Most of the first planting was killed by leaf damage from cucumber beetle alone and then of course there was the mildew later on.
I thought that I might like to try something with cucumbers similar to what Raoul did in Kenya with potatoes but I don’t know where to begin. How do you select varieties for such a trial? Or would it be a case of needing to developing new varieties through crossing? I know cucs are not self pollinating, does that make it more difficult because I can only try one at a time? I guess I have a lot of learning to do over the winter. I’m going to start by reading Return to Resistance but any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks!
Hi Emily!
Great to have you here on the site – I’m sorry I only got to wave to you at the end of the Seed Summit and we didn’t have a chance to talk. I thought it was an excellent conference and was very uplifted by all of the great work that is going on.
I don’t know very much about cucumbers, but I would suggest that your first step would be to collect a number of heritage varieties so that you can grow them all together. Then you can remove the ones that seem more susceptible, and let the better ones naturally cross-pollinate.
If you do some research on cucumber breeding, it would be great to have your findings posted here on the site – you are welcome to create a wiki section on cucumbers, and we can add a cucumber breeding forum as well if there are more people who want to work with you on them.
Cucumbers
Hi Emily,
I have never worked with cucumbers and have hesitated to reply for that reason. However, Arvana’s comments make a lot of sense. It seems to me that the biggest problem is the size of the plants, because a large screening population would take up a lot of room. I would suggest planting your screening population at two, or four, or even eight times the normal planting density, expecting to cull the most susceptible individuals fairly early in the season.
Another problem is choosing the male parents; their pest/disease resistance may be visible, but their fruit quality may not. This means that you should do your crossing only after the first fruits have formed so that you can get a fair idea of fruit quality before choosing the parents of the next screening generation.
Remember also that all your assessments of resistance must be relative measurements. This is because of parasite interference. The most resistant individuals will have considerably more resistance than is immediately apparent.