I ended my post Future Pickles? with a question and happily now have the answer:
This photo shows the first female bud from my experimental cucumber and it proves that my experiment is working.
I delayed the female blooms for a month because I wanted to determine whether the day length sensitivity, if compromised, would prevent the plant from fruiting. Apparently not.
Please compare this overlay of a detail taken from the photo shown above with the original photo.
The boy flowers start out as little ovals on the end of a slender stem:
The girl flowers, even before they open, have a second oval atop the stem but below what will soon be a blossom.
Thus, the above photo is proof that even if we get the cucumber seedlings off to a good start by allowing them to remain in the nurturing environment of an AeroGarden, when taken out they will still perform in a passive hydroponic planter.
This is very good to know in our climate, because that means I can start the cucumbers indoors a few weeks before the weather normally cools down, and then by manipulating the lighting, time them to go outside days or even weeks later in case it gets too hot again.
I came close to killing a couple of pepper plants because after waiting until we though the worst of the summer heat was over, I put them out and slept late the next morning. By the time I got out to check on them they were about goners.
The fact that female buds are in evidence also answers a question going around in some circles as to whether or not it is possible to grow cucumbers in an AeroGarden.
Again, the issue is that cucumbers are day-length sensitive and if they get more than eleven hours of direct light a day, this suppresses the plant's ability to produce female flowers. To test this theory, I kept a cucumber plant near the grow-lamps on our AeroGardens after the male flowers started opening. The grow-lamps are programmed to stay on for 18 hours and off for 6 hours.
For a whole month the plant kept producing male flowers, but not one female flower.
Then I started moving the plant away from the grow-lamps for part of each day. Within just a few days, this same plant began producing female buds. Although these have not opened yet, there is no doubt about their gender, and the sketches above overlay photos I took of both the girl and boy flowers to show their gender differentiation.
When the girl flowers show, I'd rather just put the cucumbers out for the bees to pollinate, because they are early risers and I am not. As they are heat-loving plants, that shouldn't be too much of a problem, but some of our hot spells here in the desert might even cook a cucumber.
So far, this one is doing OK outdoors:
These are still in the Aerogarden:
For some reason the link to Johnny's Seeds where I bought the seeds for
these miniature white cucumbers did not work in my response to Ginger's
comment below so I will try again here:
Can't manage a link for the white Pearl variety that she grew, but here is a source for the seeds, which Park doesn't actually sell at present:
NOTE: If you are transplanting the cukes into dirt instead of a hydroponic planter, of course, it is better to remove them from the AeroGarden before the roots mature to the point where they have adapted to living in a liquid nutrient solution.
