kool,,i am waiting to see the explanation of this, it is past april fools day isn't it.

Most likely IMO would be cross-pollination from another variety this year. Were these seeds saved from last year? If so then its possibly CP from last year but more likely CP from this year.

Dave

Last year was my first growing season. We had several varieties of cukes and ended up w/ cross pollination. Also so wierd looking fruit from incomplete pollination. This year I'm only going w/ straight eight cukes. Next year I might try a burpless.

Dave, cross pollination from this year wouldn't be evident in the cucumber. It would show up in NEXT years cucumbers grown from those cross pollinated seeds. If it was CP, it would have had to have been from last year.

Here is a link that might be useful: Cross Pollination

That's what I thought regarding the cross pollination. Regardless though, if it was cross pollinated last year and hte seed planted this year....why are there TWO different colored, shaped cucumbers on ONE plant?

If it was cross pollinated, one would assume that all the cukes would be white...but they are not.

This is an odd cucumber plant.

Still looking for a explanation for this.

Dave, cross pollination from this year wouldn't be evident in the cucumber. It would show up in NEXT years cucumbers grown from those cross pollinated seeds.

You are absolutely right of course riley and in my convoluted fashion that is what I was trying to say but in re-reading I realize I clearly didn't make sense. Rack it up to another senior moment. :( Thanks for catching it and correcting me.

Dave

I don't see any cukes, odd or not, not on the first 3 whole pages. Can you just put up the cuke pic?

probably there are two vines close together.

Seeds are nor like cats and rats to have more than one sex partner to have different looking off springs.

I would guess that the white one is over mature and has been there a while. I haven't planted this variety before, however if you leave cucs on Picklebush variety, they will get big, fat and white.

Just an idea.

Thanks for all your imput everyone....

but, they aren't on two separate vines...they are on the same plant.

In the picture on my blog...if you look close to the right of the normal cukes...you will see another little cucumber...and it is white!

rockguy-i'm not sure why you can't see the pic of the cucumbers. It's the first post. I would post a pic here, but I don't know how. Sorry. :(

This is very weird.

Here is a link that might be useful: How my garden grows!

Hi Dutchess,

Very nice blog, but I can't see the cucumber pictures either. To post a picture here, you need to first upload it to a free photo hosting site like photobucket (www.photobucket.com). If you use photobucket, create a free account and upload picture. In album view, when you roll the mouse over the picture, several options will appear below the picture. Click on HTML code, which will copy the code for your picture. Then paste it in your message here and when you hit preview, it will appear like so:

{{gwi:14206}}

I believe if you click on my photo, it will take you to my album in photobucket. From there you can chose to create your own account.

Bellatrix

If they're on the same vine, the roundish white one is over-mature.

Pick it now or the vine will stop producing.

As I stated in my post above, I had different looking cukes on the same plants last year. Some I know were not fully pollinated, but the others certainly seemed like a cross to me. It was purchased commercial seed, so I don't now if CP happened in the previous year.

I think the OP has been answered over mature. Here's the pic

>

Here is a link that might be useful: HTML examples

I agree with the diagnosis of overmature-- if you squeeze it, does it feel soft?

rj...thanks for posting the pic....I think I figured out the photobucket thingy. I was going to try it, but you beat me to it!

Those of you that think the cuke is overripe...if you look to right hand side of the normal green cuke, you will another white cucumber starting...that one is obviously not overripe.

The last white one was fine...they ate it and said it was good.

Triploid cucumbers do that. A triploid has 3 sets of chromosomes instead of the normal 2. They are F1 hybrids bred by crossing a tetraploid (4 sets) with a diploid (2 sets). Tetraploid curcurbits are mutants created usually with colchicine (extracted from Autumn Crocuses) injected into a normal diploid plant.

A triploid cucumber can produce fruit even if it doesn't get pollinated (great for greenhouses), however the fruit will look different. Unpollinated, the fruit will be seedless, smaller than a normal cucumber (great for pickles), and look somewhat shriveled up. Pollinated, it will be larger than normal and have seeds, which will not grow true, if you're thinking of saving seeds. Skin color and spines (or lack thereof) will often be a different color, and the fruit will look mature earlier, even if it isn't, which is good for certain fruit growers because of a much larger harvesting window, but bad for buyers because they think that they are buying ripe fruit when it is still unripe and tasteless, common with triploid cantaloupes.

Could that be what happened with my "pumpcorn" squash?

{{gwi:51733}}

These all grew from the same plant (an acorn squash vine), unless there was secretly some other vine in there that I neither planted nor knew about (and I don't know how a pumpkin vine could go unnoticed!). I got quiet a few fairly normal acorn squash, but one gigantic squash that seemed more like a pumpkin.

Hello,
I felt obligated to respond to someguyinmaine's post. There have been triploids made of many cucurbits but commercially the only available triploids are of watermelon. You can get tetraploid cucumbers and pickles through spontaneous doubling of chromosomes, but this is usually assoiciated with virus resistance back ground. With that you get very serated edges on the leaves and very short, blocky fruit. It is possible to get triploid cucumbers this way, if the spontaneous tetra gets crossed with the male line (diploid).

You can have parthenocarpic cucurbits. This is highly associated with gynoecious trait. There are commercially abailable parth cucumbers and squash. These are seedles, unless they have pollen source then they become seeded. These are pretty much exclusively for greenhouse/protected culture.

Triploid plants still need to be pollinated to set fruit. They are seedless because they are mutants. You can have spontaneous reversion and get a triploid to set viable fruit (seed) and that is genetically controlled. You can always tell if a seed is "viable", won't necessarily germinate, by cuting open the seed coat and looking for endosperm. That is how we identify the spontaneous reversions we seen in triploids when we are selecting new "seedless" watermelons.

I have never seen a triploid cantaloupe but it wouldn't make sense to have them commercially available. The seed would be too expensive to produce for the economics of the melon market as most melons are andromonecious. Since true cantaloupe and muskmelon slip from the vine at maturity I don't know how you would get a triploid melon that matures earlier. You can have long shelf life melons that do not slip from the vine but they also don't produce ethylene like normal melons and take much longer to mature. This is what is not controlling most of the off season melons shipped from C. America to the US. They are nonsutured Italian cantaloupes with the LSL trait. Previously grown western shippers that tasted bad during the winter season were because of the high night temperatures in C. America that caused the melons to mature in 60-63 days after transplanting. The same melons grown in AZ take over 90 days to mature from direct seeding.

I don't know what is going on with the cucumber in the picture. But I don't think it is a triploid.

Thanks
Jonny

Now I feel obligated to counter respond to yumamelon's post.

Triploid cucumis (Cucumbers, muskmelons, etc.) DO NOT need to be pollinated in order to set fruit. They are like triploid apples, which still will bear small little fruits if the blossoms don't get pollinated. (Unpollinated triploid apples aren't salable, but they can still be processed for cider. Just like triploid cucumbers, the unpollinated fruit will look different than the pollinated.)

Triploid watermelons DO need to be pollinated, but because of the random arrangement of chromosomes, most of the seeds will be sterile. Even though they are marketed with the lie that they are seedless, everyone who has eaten one knows that it isn't seedless, just that most of the seeds are duds.

Triploid cucumbers have been bred by what I described above since the early 1970's and are currently often grown in greenhouses in Europe. More info on the hybridizing can be found in the "Polyploidy in the Glasshouse Cucumber" article written by P. Grimbly of the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute, Sussex, England in the Journal Euphytica, Volume 22, Number 3, except in that article, Dr. Grimbly discusses soaking diploid seeds in colchicine, rather than injecting it into immature plants, but either way gets the same outcome, a tetraploid.

Triploid muskmelons are hybridized in the same manner. After the Plant Biotechnology Group in Ibaraki, Japan experimented with the technique and published their findings in one of the Japanese breeding journals (I can't remember which one at the moment), many breeders started experimenting with triploid muskmelons and cantaloupes. They are not usually marketed as triploids, just that one can harvest earlier and the plants are more vigourous. Triploid cucumis usually have sterile pollen, so seeds are often shipped with a pollenizer (often the diploid parent).

Triploid muskmelons have been grown for years, but growers do not prevent the pollination. They could, but one would end up with an immature fruit, similar to an unripe cucumber. They do not get a fruit that ripens earlier. It just sizes up and LOOKS ripe earlier, so it will often be cut from the plant before it is truly ripe. If allowed to actually ripen on the plant, the fruit would be about 1.5x normal size. It is easy for the buyer to check the melon to see whether it has been cut or slipped from the plant.

Above, when writing about tasteless cantaloupes, I did not mean the slight bitterness of the fruit when grown in a too hot environment. I meant the unripe cucumber-like taste.

Triploid snake malons (C. melo), the same species that muskmelons are a member of, are very commonly grown without pollination in a greenhouse. They are often sold as those 2 ft long seedless cucumbers, often wrapped in plastic instead of waxed.

Hello again,
What you are desribing can be done but I just don't think it is. I can't really speak about the Japanese market. The Japanese went crazy with making triploids of all kinds of things.

I have never seen a triploid melon set fruit w/o pollination after looking at close to 100 crosses in greenhouse trials a couple of years ago to see if we could increase tollerance to soil borne disase.

The company I work for has 30% market share in western type cantaloupe and honeydew and I can assure you there are no triploid cantalopes or honeydew on the market. Business wise it doesn't make any sense. We do see later maturity, better color, and more sugar in triploids, better firmness ("shelflife"), along with "seedlessness". We do not see larger sizes with triploids.

We do not have blended seed in inventory of any of our melons worldwide (although we aren't strong in Korea or Japan). If the triploid is later than the diploid and you "blend" the seed you are going to have problems. If we assume that you use 12% (like gy cucumber), that 12% will be ready 1 week prior to the triploid. You are eiter looking at loosing up to 12% of your yield or you need to match up the 2n to the maturity of the 3n.

I am not super familiar with the European GH cucumber market but I know none of our Dutch types, Parth Slicer types, Beta Alpah Parth types, Parth Pickles or regular cucumbers are triploid. Economically, Europe and Asia are the only places this type of material would work. Tetraploids are terrible seed yielders and the cost of goods for a triploid is significantly higher than for a diploid. Europe gets much higher seed prices than we do in the US.

You can get better costs on triploid production by doing in vitro increases but this only works for transplant markets. The only transplant market we have for melon is in C. America. AZ, TX, CA are all direct seeded melons.

It is possible but I have never seen a commercially produced triploid melon or cucumber.

Thanks, this has been fun stuff!
Jonny

Wow -- I sure hope someone figures out what is going on with your cukes, dutchess (and karenrei's "pumpcorn" squash!) -- and I sure hope I can get rid of the headache I have after trying to follow the fascinating if dismayingly complicated discussion between someguyinmaine & yumamelon, 2 obviously highly educated plant guys!! :-)
P.S. Do you live near a nuclear power plant? LOL

P.S. Do you live near a nuclear power plant? LOL

Actually, I'm about 35 miles away from one... ;)