The French Garden Blog

THE SEX LIFE OF THE CUCUMBER

Richard has found some flourishing cucumbers hiding under our mountainous courgette plants, where they have been surreptitiously doing their thing. He has brought four whoppers into the house this evening. I will make a cucumber pickle with one or several of them, but he was concerned as to how they would taste. If you are not careful you can grow very bitter cucumbers.

The problem with cucumbers starts when the female is fertilized by the male (so what is so surprising about that, you think). If it is fertilized the resultant fruit becomes bitter and twisted – again, shades of déjà vu in the Adams' household. Traditionally gardeners would pick off the male flowers on a cucumber plant to avoid any promiscuity in the cold frame, but modern horticulturalists can now buy plants or seeds which have female only flowers in normal circumstances. When I started growing vegetables I always grew a variety called Pepinex because it had been bred to do just that, and I never had any problems – lovely, straight sweet cucumbers which were a joy to eat.

Nature, of course, is always one step ahead of us. She wants to pollenate her female cucumbers because she needs some of them to set seed and provide future generations of plants. So if a plant becomes stressed – even if it has been bred to develop only female flowers – it will spontaneously create male flowers too so that the female cucumbers can be fertilised, set seed and the species will survive. When I first heard this it put me in mind of the British population after the First World War. We were short of men after the butchery on the battlefields of northern France and I am told the proportion of male babies born in the few years afterwards increased. I don’t think this is an apocryphal story, but other people may know better than me. I think it was nature recognizing a stressed population and doing something about it.

The problems facing us in our kitchen is this; have those furtive cucumbers which have been romping about under the courgette leaves been stressed or bathed in zen like happiness? We had better eat one and find out.