This is a quick followup on my last gardening post, where I answered the question “where do seedless cucumber seeds come from?”.
The short answer is that most of them are first-generation hybrids. Thus, seedless cucumbers seeds come from the fruit that results from crossing two carefully-chosen seeded cucumbers. The resulting fruit has seeds, but those F1 seeds are then sterile, in the sense that the plant grown from that will not produce viable seeds.
And now, with this post, I can answer the question “why didn’t my seedless cucumber seeds sprout?”.
Having now re-planted my seedless cucumber and summer squash varieties, I can definitively answer that with “because I turned them into the worlds most expensive birdseed.” Roughly $6,000/lb, assuming I did the math right. My seeds “didn’t sprout” because they’d been pecked out by birds.
In any case, I’ve replanted small numbers of all the varieties. This time I carefully nurtured them in my indoor seed-starting setup (G22-003). (That’s a couple of plastic totes wedged into an open double-hung window sash.
Using this bird-free approach, I’m getting a 100% germination rate.
The upshot is that my poor germination rate wasn’t product failure, it was operator error. The seeds used to grow seedless cucumbers are just as viable as any other garden seeds.
