How to grow cucumbers on a windowsill: expert advice on variety selection and cultivation ⋆ 👨‍🌾 Farmer-online ⋆

Waiting for spring is not so tiring if you find something to do. For example, grow cucumbers on the windowsill. If there is additional lighting, you can sow the seeds of cucumbers in the apartment in January, if not, postpone sowing to February or March. But it’s worth preparing everything you need, choosing varieties and hybrids of cucumbers suitable for apartment conditions right now.

Leading cucumber seed suppliers have helped us compile a list of the best indoor cucumber varieties and hybrids. The general requirement is shade tolerance, because even on the southern window the plants will be lit much weaker than in the greenhouse. As for other parameters, you can choose different solutions.

Choosing varieties and hybrids of cucumbers for growing on a windowsill.

Olga Baklanova, cucumber breeder, Agroholding Poisk

When choosing varieties and hybrids for growing in an apartment, it is necessary to take into account not only their shade tolerance. There are other important qualities:

The combination of high night temperatures (a battery under the window sill!) and low light (short days and cloudy weather) can increase the number of male flowers on the plant and, therefore, reduce the number of potential greens. Therefore, you need to choose the most hardy and unpretentious.
It is necessary to avoid thickened plantings and shading of plants with each other.
Both bee-pollinated cucumbers and parthenocarpics are suitable for the windowsill. Of course, manual pollination will be necessary first, but on the scale of a window sill, these are mere trifles.

For early sowing without additional illumination (approximately in mid-February), cucumbers are suitable:

F1 Forward, F1 Faust – smooth parthenocarpic hybrids. Their distinctive feature is increased shade tolerance plus high taste and commercial qualities of greens. These hybrids bear fruit well in conditions of short day and lack of light.

F1 Forward – tall plant. Branching is weak, which makes it easy to care for.

Faust F1 – also tall, medium branching, female type of flowering.

When sowing later (early or mid-March), try parthenocarpic hybrids F1 Arbat и F1 Flagship. They combine early maturity (up to 45-47 days from germination) and yield with excellent taste and unique cucumber aroma of crispy tuberculate fruits.

Sergey Dubinin, head of SeDek company

We recommend growing parthenocarpic hybrids on the windowsill. In our assortment there are not only shade-tolerant, but also with a very high stress resistance. This quality is important, because the apartment has dry air, drafts and a small amount of soil in which the plants are planted dries up quickly. Choose hybrids with the type of fruit you like best.

In early spring, lettuce cucumbers with a smooth skin without pimples usually go with a bang. Very sweet and fragrant fruits in hybrids: F1 Window-balcony, F1 Galina, F1 Elizaveta (the latter has rare tubercles on the fetus).

Lovers of small-tubercular fruits (in a “German shirt”) will suit unpretentious F1 Patty и F1 Diva with a bundle arrangement of the ovary and crispy cucumbers that are not bitter under any growing conditions. Good not only fresh, but also marinated.

If you think a cucumber is not a cucumber without a real pimply skin, choose F1 Russian style. It begins to bear fruit very quickly (45-48 days from germination) and is resistant to root rot – an important quality when growing cucumbers in the cold season, even in an apartment.

For growing indoors, I recommend choosing varieties and hybrids with good branching ability. The height of the window usually allows the cucumber to produce only 6–7 leaves from the base of the stem to the top of the window frame. When the plant bears fruit on this part of the shoot, it forms lateral lashes, from which it will be possible to harvest an additional crop.

The most shade-tolerant cucumbers are winter bee-pollinated hybrids, bred specifically for growing in year-round greenhouses. Suitable for sowing in the second half of February: F1 Relay, F1 Olympiad, F1 Manul, F1 Marathon with a predominantly female type of flowering. They need to be pollinated by hand, but their taste and unpretentiousness are worth it. The listed hybrids usually produce enough male flowers for pollination, but it is still better to plant one pollinator plant for safety net. It can be any variety or hybrid with a male type of flowering, for example, Phoenix.

Parthenocarpics are more convenient to grow on the windowsill, since they do not need pollination, but they are generally more sensitive to lack of lighting, so it is advisable to sow them in March. The most shade-tolerant, in my opinion, parthenocarpic hybrid – F1 TLC 442. For March sowing, in addition, hybrids with increased shade tolerance and a beam type of fruiting are suitable: F1 Moscow Nights, F1 Maryina Roshcha, F1 Chistye Prudy, F1 Sekret Firmy, F1 Hit of the Season.

Anna Shamshina, cucumber breeder, Gavrish company

We have very shade tolerant hybrids F1 Courage (parthenocarpic) and F1 Athlete (bee-pollinated), recommended for growing on the windowsill. Both with a beam arrangement of ovaries. They differ not only in excellent taste and resistance to diseases, but also in the average shoot-forming ability, which is convenient for formation on the windowsill. At first, the plant goes into one stem, does not branch, does not obscure itself, which is important with a lack of light. When fruiting on the main stem, it produces side shoots that need to be pinched off above the second node. An additional crop is formed on the side shoots.

Container for growing cucumbers on the windowsill

For growing cucumber, select a container with a capacity of at least 5 liters per plant. The root system of the cucumber does not tolerate either waterlogging or drying of the soil, when the concentration of the soil solution rises sharply. The larger the pot, the easier it will be to maintain a constant water-salt regime, in other words, to keep the soil moderately moist.

soil for cucumbers

Cucumbers will do well in light fertile soil with a high content of organic matter and a pH of 6,3-6,8. You can buy ready-made high-quality soil for cucumber seedlings or prepare one of the recommended soil mixtures yourself:

garden soil (loam), peat, humus (4:1:1), for 5 liters of the mixture add half a glass of wood ash and 1 tbsp. l. complete fertilizer, 1 tsp. magnesium sulfate;
turf or garden land (loam), biohumus (1: 1), 3 tbsp. l. wood ash per 5 liters of the mixture;
peat, humus, sawdust, turf or garden soil (2:2:1:2), half a glass of wood ash, 1 tsp. magnesium sulfate and 1 tbsp. l. full fertilizer for 5 liters of mixture.

Sowing cucumbers

Fill the container with soil, not reaching 3-4 cm from the edge. The soil should be slightly moist, but free-flowing. If the seeds are not expensive, sow 3 seeds at once in one hole, at a distance of 1-2 cm from each other. The seeding depth is 2-3 cm. Seeds pre-treated with stimulants and or microelements (as in the photo) are sown dry. Ordinary seeds can first be hardened by keeping them in a damp cloth in the vegetable compartment of the refrigerator for two days. This will increase their resistance to stress and cold (in winter and early spring, the potted soil on the windowsill can get very cold). It is for this reason that it is better not to sow cucumbers on the windowsill with “pegs”, as is usually done in the summer in the garden when the soil is warm enough.

More: How to prepare cucumber seeds for sowing

Water the seed hole.

Cover the pot with glass or a plastic bag and put it in a warm place with a temperature of + 25 … + 30 ° C (for example, under the kitchen ceiling) before germination. As soon as shoots appear, remove the shelter, move the pot to the windowsill. It is advisable to put a heat-insulating material under it (for example, foam). Make sure that drafts do not fall on the plant.

When the first true leaves appear, thin out the seedlings. You need to leave one of the largest, remove the rest.

Use twine as a support for the whip. As the stem grows, it is wrapped around the support.

Once every 10-14 days, feed the plant with fertilizer for seedlings according to the instructions. Be careful: if the fertilizer is applied to both potted plants and vegetables in the ground, the feeding rates when growing in containers should be 10 times lower, otherwise the fertilizer may burn the roots. Cucumbers prefer organo-mineral or organic fertilizers – for example, an infusion of mullein or horse manure.