There are understandable reasons why cucumbers are empty inside. If such a disaster happens to the harvest, you need to work on the mistakes next season. Here are the main areas to pay attention to when growing cucumbers:
- microclimate;
- watering;
- soil quality and balanced nutrition;
- varietal characteristics and timely harvesting;
- diseases.
We will deal with each point separately in order to understand our mistakes and not repeat them again. The listed factors affect the quality of fruits when growing cucumbers both in open ground and in a greenhouse.
Harvesting and variety characteristics
Summer residents, who rarely come to their country house, collect hollow cucumbers more often than others.During peak fruiting, young cucumbers should be collected every day or at least every other day. Harvesting once every 5 - 7 days leads to the fact that the greens are overripe and voids appear in them.
The problem can be solved by careful selection of seeds for planting. Preference should be given to hybrids. On the package of seeds next to the name there should be the designation F1. Most of the newest hybrids do not form voids inside the fruit. If you carefully read the description of the variety printed on the packaging, you can find seeds with the desired characteristics for growing in a greenhouse and in open ground.
When choosing seeds, another characteristic is important - the purpose of use. According to the value of this characteristic, all varieties (hybrids) are divided into 3 groups:
- salad;
- universal;
- canned.
Less often, canning cucumbers are hollow, followed by universal ones; most often, greenhouse salad varieties outgrow and become empty.
Microclimate
We can talk about microclimate when growing crops in a greenhouse. In open ground, air humidity and temperature are determined by the weather. The large difference between night and day temperatures in August leads to the formation of cavities in the fruits.
In protected soil, this problem is not so pressing; in the garden, cucumber beds need to be covered with covering material at night to maintain optimal temperature at night.
Shelter will improve the formation of fruits, since cucumbers grow at night, and the temperature required for plants to grow should be above 20 °C.
Watering
A very important condition for the quality of fruits is proper watering. Insufficient watering has a negative effect on the quality of cucumber pulp. The lack of moisture is especially noticeable in hot weather. Excessive watering after a long period of drought worsens marketability.
This problem can be solved in several ways:
- organize an automatic drip irrigation system;
- cover the soil under the bushes with a layer of mulch (15 cm);
- water with a watering can, but regularly, not allowing the top layer to dry out.
Mulching the soil not only allows you to retain moisture, but also improves the structure of the soil, which directly affects the nutrition of plants, and therefore the quality of the fruit and the density of their pulp. When caring for the crop, you need to remember that soil moisture should be constant and not fall below 75%.
Soil quality and balanced nutrition
If you use organic and mineral fertilizers ineptly, you can get a crop of poor quality.
Cucumbers with voids inside are poor raw materials for preparations and are not the best product for making salads.
If the pulp of fresh cucumbers has a loose structure, you need to analyze the feeding scheme. Perhaps, by adding fertilizers to the soil, the balance between nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium was upset. Cavities inside fruits occur when there is an excess of nitrogen. An imbalance often occurs when organic matter (manure) and urea are added simultaneously.
To avoid this problem, when preparing the soil in the spring (autumn), apply humus and mineral fertilizers to the cucumbers according to the norm. The norm is determined based on the soil structure: different types of soil (loamy, clayey, sandy loam) require their own proportions of fertilizers.
For a balanced diet of cucumbers, it is better to use complex mineral fertilizers. The packaging always indicates the ratio of essential nutrients.It must be remembered that during the formation of ovaries and fruits, the plant needs more potassium, during flowering it needs phosphorus, and nitrogen is needed in the initial period, when there is an active growth of green mass.
Diseases
Cucumber is a crop sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Stress for her is an increase in temperature above 30 °C and a decrease below 10 °C. During times of stress, immunity decreases and the risk of infectious diseases increases.
Defects may form in cucumbers if the bush is infected with a virus. Crop losses from diseases of viral origin are significant. For example, viral necrosis reduces yield by 20%, or even by 50%.
You can avoid fruit deformity and plant death from viral diseases by following certain rules:
- crop rotation;
- healthy seeds;
- varieties resistant to viruses;
- soil treatment before planting with fungicides;
- balanced nutrition and watering.
You can increase the immunity of plants in a greenhouse (soil) with the help of growth regulators, which should be in the arsenal of every summer resident. By using them in the required proportions, you can get a full harvest even in bad weather conditions.
Eliminating the reasons why cucumbers are empty inside will help improve the quality of the harvest. In winter, the jars will not contain wrinkled, soft fruits, but elastic and crunchy cucumbers.
