Early Flowering Pollenizers for Improved Yield and Quality of Gynoecious Pickling Cucumbers

Abstract

Most gynoecious hybrid cucumbers (Cucumis sativus L.) grown in the U.S. require pollination for proper fruit set. Early flowering pollenizers may help yield, earliness, or quality. Two experiments were run to measure the value of early pollenizers using fields isolated from other cucumbers by at least 1 km. The first experiment used `Armstrong Early Cluster' and `Sumter' as the early and normal pollenizer, with 30 and 35 days to flower, respectively. Gy 2, Gy 3, Gy 4, and Gy 14 were used as the gynoecious pickling cucumbers. The experiment was run in 2 years (1994, 1995) and seven locations in North Carolina with two pollenizers and the four gynoecious inbreds. There were four replications of plots within each whole plot to help control variability inherent in an experiment where treatments are in separate fields. The second experiment had only 1 year (1996), but the same seven locations, four replications, and four gynoecious inbreds, but only one pollenizer (`Sumter') planted at the same time, or 2 weeks earlier than the gynoecious lines. Plots were harvested once when 30% of the fruits were >50 mm diameter. None of the differences in either experiment were significant (F-ratio test, 10% level). Therefore, it does not appear that use of early flowering pollenizers in blends with gynoecious pickling cucumbers will have a large effect on the yield, earliness, or internal quality of the crop.