I've been off the site for a while and trying to catch up. Here in Michigan its been HOT HOT HOT....for those that don't remember me, I do only container gardening. Everything is going very well, but I've been out of the garden for the last several days due to a wrenched back...and I haven't been checking the "garden". Dad has been watering, and tonight I checked on the "babies"...and all of my cucumber buds (the little pickles) have all dried up...just kind of brown and dry...but there was a HUGE cucumber...seriously! It wasn't there 3 days ago. We're trying to figure out what the heck happened. It seems I've lost all the little buds, and this "monster" took over. I picked him tonight, but will I get more cukes? It's very sad...I think we had 10-12 potentials, and they all look dead (the plant itself looks GREAT). Help?

This is a pollination problem. Either there are not enough bees around or the weather has been too hot for the blossoms to set fruit. You could try hand pollinating to see if that makes any difference.

How do you hand pollinate cukes? I do that with my squash plants - the flowers are large and females easily distinguishable from male flowers, but the cuke flower parts are much smaller, harder to access and the flowers all look the same to me. I haven't had a single fruit set so far.

hmm, a friend brought over a cucumber plant for me, and im kind of stumped as well. It does not seem to grow very fast, and produced flowers at a very young age (or at least i thought it was young, because it was so small)

I know they need alot of water when a fruit sets so the taste stays fresh and crisp.

I discovered that cucumbers FOOL YA! They will be only about 12-18 inches long and start blooming.. Sometimes the little cukes (female blossoms) die/wither because they are not getting enough water.. Although pollination is definitely a problem.

IT seems to take another 1-2 weeks to get the cucumbers into their real performance, like when the vines are closer to 3 feet long. A lot does depend on weather conditions and water.

My Granny used Moon signs, she claimed if you planted in the wrong sign, you would get lots of blossoms on the cucumbers, but no cucumbers. I figured out that the blossoms are male blossoms, not female blossoms.

I raised some of the best cukes I ever had in pots in 2005 when I was keeping ducks. I had to provide the ducks with clean drinking vessels every day, so I poured the dirty water from the ducks on to the cuke plants. I was trying a new pickling cuke from Burpee that they gave free with an order. I managed to get at least 3 batches of pickles off of a few cucumber plants. The main thing was that the cukes were getting watered at least once a day with high octane water.

I'm stumped too, maybe the stars are just not properly aligned for cucumbers. Mine are really depressing me.

I planted 4 hills in May with about a dozen seeds in each hill (intending to thin them down) two varieties from two different seed companies in two of each of the hills. They came up around June 10, but only two or three plants in each hill, and now, five weeks later, they each have about four leaves. The leaves are about the size of a quarter.

Nearby, in the same soil, same planting strategy, same care, my five varieties of pumpkins and two hills of zucchini are thriving and starting to bud.

I just don't get it. By this time last year the cukes were way ahead of the other vining squashy stuff.

It's been cool and wet this summer, but I would not expect that to single out the cukes vis-a-vis the pumpkins and zucchini.

Since cucumbers are part of the same family as squash they flower the same, even if smaller. Look closely for a male blossom, no ovary (that bulbous growth right behind the flower), and after removing the flower petals waggle the rest in a female blossom.

I guess mine had only male flowers early on. I just noticed the first female blossoms yesterday, so now I'll have to add cucumber sex to my morning ritual – how naughty!