 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So in today's video we are going to be planting some cucumbers indoors from seed and we're not just talking just any old cucumber like an English cucumber or a pickling cucumber. Today I'm going to be planting up some what I like to think of as more of the exotic varieties of cucumbers. So I've got three different varieties here I want to try out today. We've got the Cucamalon which is one that I have failed at miserably so far. I got these lemon cucumber seeds from a local company that I'm excited to try out and I also have these yellow apple cucumbers which were sent to me through a seed exchange last year that I'm anxious to try out. So I was a little anxious to get this film done today because I haven't been feeling well. Just started actually today. Both my husband and I tested positive for COVID using one of those at home rapid tests and the result was positive for us both so we're decided to you know just stay in isolation here for the next four or five days. So far I don't feel too bad but I am can start to feel a head cold coming on here and I hope that I don't do too much sniffling during this video and if so I will try to edit it out as much as I can. So let's get started planting some cucumbers. So first of all I just want to talk about the cucumber in general. I think that cucumbers from the garden are one of the one of my favorites to grow. I rank cucumbers right up there with tomatoes and potatoes fresh from the garden. You just can't beat them and I don't think you can actually get a cucumber from the store or even a greenhouse that tastes as good as one fresh out of the garden. So I have gone back and forth between direct sowing and starting cucumbers indoors. A lot of the cucumbers that I grow can be direct sown into the soil once it's warm enough. I find that they germinate and sprout quite quickly and take off. I've tried starting some indoors two or three weeks before planting out and had some failures with transplanting them. So my plan this year is to go with the direct sowing for my straight aids, my pickling type, the English type cucumbers. I usually have three or four of those basic cucumbers that I will be direct sowing. So for the purpose of this video I wanted to show you how to start cucumbers indoors. I'm going to be using these particular seeds because they do recommend a cucumber melon to be started indoors. Cucummelons require a quite warm environment to get going according to the instructions here. You will find if you do some research on cucumbers, they have a lot of different names such as the mouse melon, the Mexican gherkin, I've seen Mexican watermelon and they do kind of resemble a tiny little watermelon if you can see that there. They say that they have a kind of a cucumber lime flavor which sounds good. I think these would be really great just to snack on or to have in salads as well as the lemon cucumber which obviously must have a lemon flavor. This one again was an interesting type cucumber that I've never tasted myself. And as I said, I got this yellow apple from a seed exchange from a gardening friend in Ontario. I'll put up a picture of what a yellow apple cucumber looks like. It seems quite similar to the lemon. So my plan is to plant these up in these large, I would say these are like a five inch type container. I want to get just one plant sprouted and growing in each of these containers. Keep it in here as long as I can and then transplant them into containers that will go outside. It's my understanding the cucumber melon is a very viney type cucumber that will need some trellising. As I mentioned, we love eating fresh cucumbers from the garden and having them in our salads and sandwiches. But when it comes to pickling cucumbers, that is just not something that I enjoy doing. I'm obviously not very good at it. I have tried it. I think right now there are two or three jars sitting in the back of my fridge of pickles that I've made last year that nobody has eaten. So I don't really care to pickle. Not a big pickle eater, so to speak. We enjoy the odd jar of pickles made by the Bix Company, which I think do a way better job than me. So not to offend all those pickle makers out there. I'm sure there's a lot of people that make wonderful pickles, but I do not. And we'll probably give up on trying to improve my pickling skills, at least for now anyway. So you always want to make sure that the soil that you are starting your seeds in is well saturated and moistened. It's not bad, but I should have maybe wet it down a little bit before I put it in these containers. So another method you can do is just to place it in some kind of a container here and add a couple inches of water. Just let these containers sit for 20 minutes or so to soak up as much water as they can. And then once we plant the seeds we can also do a good spray over the surface of the soil as well. So because we enjoy our fresh cucumbers so much, growing cucumbers indoor in the wintertime has also been something that I've been working really hard to perfect. I'm going to show you what I have growing here in my grow tent. So it pretty much took me all winter to finally have success with growing cucumbers indoors. It's important to find varieties that are self-pollinating or only have the female flowers so that they don't need to be pollinated. So once I caught on to that trick I got a few different varieties going here. The plants are starting to die off but I just wanted to show you that. I do have a couple more cucumbers coming here which is exciting. So I still believe that the ones out of the garden grown in dirt are the best tasting but at least now we can enjoy some fresh cucumbers off the vine all year round. So my goal is to just have one plant going in each of these containers. So I'm going to do my three seed method just to ensure germination. So we'll start off with the cucumbers. As you can see they're very tiny. They'll almost look like a sesame seed to me. So I'm going to just make a hole about a quarter inch deep, not too deep. And I'm going to plant them all fairly close to the center of this container. And once I have germination and they get a little bigger past that two leaf stage I will remove two of them and just keep the strongest of the three. So I just realized as I flipped this around that I have not marked what I've planted which is something that I have done a few times. You get planting and talking and switching around your pots and realize that you didn't mark what you just put into the dirt which can be a real pain. I was planting my peppers a couple weeks ago and making a film of it. I had four different varieties that I was going to be trying this year. Put them into the containers and put them under the lights and realize that I had not identified what each one was anywhere on the container. So all of them have sprouted. They're growing great. They all look exactly the same. And I don't think I'm going to know what kind of peppers they are until they start producing fruit in the middle of the summer. So the peppers is going to be a surprise this year. And of course cucumbers are so easy to collect seeds from in the fall. So if you have a really good variety that you like and they are preferably an heirloom as opposed to a hybrid type seed, you know, they're easy to collect and save. So that's pretty much it as far as the planting part of this goes. There's nothing too technical about planting your cucumber seeds. I'm going to give each of these a good spritzing on the top. And I've been using vermiculite on the tops of all my seedlings this year just to help keep the moisture in. It helps prevent damping off which is that kind of that green mossy, moldy stuff that you sometimes see on the top of your seedling soil. It also helps prevent fungus gnats from laying eggs in the soil. And of course if you bottom water that also helps with that damping off and fungus net issue on the top of your soil. So now I'm going to show you how I'm going to set these up under the grow lights. Give you a quick tour of what's going on down here and how things are doing. These are all my petunias and snapdragons that are filling up these cells quite quickly. All my tomatoes that you seen a video on last week are sprouting which is very exciting. Over here are more petunias, pansies, onions. Onions are going to need a haircut here pretty soon. The colysis that I transplanted showed you in a previous video are all doing great. More pansies. Here are my mystery peppers. So you can see they all look pretty much the same. So we'll see how those turn out. So something I didn't mention at the beginning of the video is that we are at about seven weeks before our last frost date here on the Saskatchewan Carries. I usually go by May long weekend here which is the 23rd of May as kind of the big planting weekend. So counting back from that weekend we're at about seven weeks. So for cucumbers they recommend if you start them indoors do it six to eight weeks prior to your last frost date. So we are pretty much right on par here. So I'm going to be using this DIY grow box that I built a couple years ago. I have a video that I can leave you the link below. It's very easy. It's just made out of a Rubbermaid tub lined with tinfoil. Got a grow light in the lid here. And I'm also using a seedling heat mat which is something you don't have to use but if you are one who does a lot of seed starting indoors I highly recommend investing in one. They don't cost a whole lot and they're great for some of these seedlings that like that extra heat when they are sprouting. So I have this set to be on 24 seven and I have this grow light plugged in on my timer bar that is set to be on for 16 hours off for eight. So it'll be nice and close to these plants for now. So I expect to see germination here with these cucumbers within seven to 14 days. So if you enjoyed watching my video I would appreciate it if you hit that like button. 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