How To Harvest Cucumber Seeds To Plant In Your Garden Next Year

If you love gardening, putting in the hard work to see your vegetables grow and mature generates feelings of pride. If you want to take your gardening work one step further, you could begin the process of seed-saving from your garden, where you collect seeds from this year's crop and save them to plant next year.

When you grow cucumber plants in your garden to eat, you'll pick them before they reach full maturity since that's when they have the best taste. They should be green when you harvest them for eating. However, when you want to harvest them to save the seeds, you should allow the cucumbers to get overripe. That's when they'll turn yellow and orange. They also should be large and round when they reach this level of maturity. After harvesting, you'll have to place the seeds in a jar with a little bit of water for a few days to remove the gel around the seeds, allowing them to ferment and to prepare them for germination the following year.

If this is the first time you're trying to save seeds, tomatoes, beans, and peas are some of the easiest seeds to start saving because they have self-pollinating flowers. Cucumbers are a little more difficult when it comes to saving seeds because they typically require help from animals and insects to accomplish pollination, which complicates the seed-saving process a little bit.

To harvest the seeds from the over-ripe cucumber, cut it in half lengthwise. The entire center should be filled with the seeds and pulp tinged with an orange hue. Scoop out the seeds and pulp from the cavity into a jar and add a couple of inches of water to cover the seeds and pulp for fermentation.

Leave the container open and store it at between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit for two to three days. When it's ready, the viable seeds will sink to the bottom. Remove the floating seeds and discard. Filter the water and pulp from the remaining seeds, and lay them on a paper towel until they're dry enough to break in half. Then, store them in an airtight container in a dark, cool place until the following spring for planting.

Cucumber seeds are tough to save in part because cross-pollination complicates the process. If you try to save from a cross-pollenated cucumber, you'll potentially collect seeds that are sterile or aren't the same kind as their parents. As long as you're collecting cucumber seeds from plants that don't have other cucumber species within half a mile, you shouldn't have problems with cross pollination. Avoid saving seeds from cucumbers labeled as hybrid or F1 plants, too, as you can't be certain they'll produce the same plants in the next generation. One final tip: Although you only need one cucumber to harvest from, saving a mixture of seeds from up to 10 vegetables ensures the best variety for the next growing season.