Harvesting Japanese cucumber

Remember my update on my japanese cucumber plant back on 29th December 2012?

My japanese cucumber back then in 29 December 2012.

Suddenly it started to grow and flower so much. When the flowers appear, especially when the female flowers appear, its time to get busy.

Usually helpful insects will help to pollinate the male and female flowers. But in my case, my garden is pretty new so there is not much flower to attract the right helpful insects to help pollinate the cucumber. So what you need to do is, hand pollinate them. There are 2 ways to do it. As soon as you see a female flower ( a flower with tiny cucumber at the back), you need to watch out for the flower to bloom so you can hand pollinate them.

Find a male flower. Male flowers only have flower and no baby cucumbers at the back.

Remove the petal and leave only the middle part of the flower.

And you just flick the middle part of the flower into the female flower. Make sure that the middle part of the flower touches each other.

Or you may use a brush to brush the middle part of the male flower.

This is a female flower. And after you brushed the male, you need to quickly brush the female flower to  pollinate them. And you need to do this a few times (few days) as long as the flower blooms. So how do you know if its successful or not?

See that the cucumber is dying? It's a sign of failed hand pollinated jap cucumber. 

And this is how a successful hand pollinated jap cucumber looks like.

this was in 3 days time (left : 12/1/2012, and right 15/1/2013) I covered the jap cucumber with netting that I got from my grocery shopping cos I don't wanna let the cucumber beetle to destroy my precious cucumber. How do they look like?

Like this. And one of them, can cause ALOT of harm. No joke.

There is no pesticide to kill them except your hands. Squash them as you see otherwise you can kiss your cucumber and squash goodbye.

And this was today, 4 days after the pic (15/1/2012)

Check it out!

And this is me with my first ever Japanese cucumber grown in my house.

I showed the above pic to my JD who was upstairs at that time and he said "WOW!!!" and quickly ran down to see it with his own eyes. I said "do you wanna help me harvest it?  let me get a scissors" And he ran back into the house and came back with his own scissors (with his name on it). It's a joy seeing him getting so excited to help me harvest this jap cucumber. Gardening is not only my source of therapy, but its also a teaching ground for me, where I share with my kids on how to grow things, what to do and what not to do. Not sure if any of my teaching goes into their system but at least they know that we can grow food although we stay in a city with limited space and I'm no expert in gardening.

Nothing is impossible :)

So here's my 2nd harvesting video. Don't curse me cos I accidentally took it sideways and distorted the whole video. *lol* I'll learn from my mistake!  Well at least the first 2 pics and last 3 pics are fine :P