Cucumbers On The Windowsills

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Many are familiar with the feeling when, having moved from a private country house to a comfortable city apartment, you begin to yearn for work in the garden. But as practice shows, in order to have fresh vegetables from your own garden on your table, it is quite possible to do without your own garden. You can adapt your windowsills for growing cucumbers and tomatoes. What conditions must be met for this?

Where and what to grow cucumbers in indoor conditions

In the warm season, you can grow cucumbers on balconies and loggias. In a cooler period, the beds are moved to the apartment on the windowsills. Optimal for these purposes will be windows facing south, as well as southeast and southwest.

You can adapt a wide variety of household containers to the beds. These can be boxes, buckets, troughs, basins, bags for construction waste or cereals and sugar. It is important that the container provides filling with a layer of earth with a depth of at least 40 cm. It is also desirable that the width of the container is about 50 cm. The container is calculated so that, on average, about 10 liters of container volume per planted plant.

Vegetables will need to be grown in good drainage conditions. To do this, expanded clay is laid on the bottom with a layer of at least 2 cm - this is the best option. If there is no expanded clay, shards of red brick, gravel, broken shards will do for such purposes. You can even use walnut shells. In addition, for improvised beds, you will need to arrange a tray where excess water will drain.

Nutrient substrate for cucumbers

Cucumbers love nutritious, fertile soil with a loose structure. The following soil composition is good for growing:

• peat - 6 parts;

• sod land - 4 parts;

• sawdust - 4 parts;

• clean coarse sand - 1 part.

If there is nowhere to get peat, it can be replaced with other components: compost, humus. But then the soil recipe will be sustained in slightly different proportions:

• compost - 5 parts;

• sawdust - 1 part;

• sand - 1 part.

The mixture should be as homogeneous as possible. To fertilize buckets of such a substrate, 20 g of urea and potassium chloride are used, as well as 40 g of superphosphate. In addition, a glass of wood ash is used for fertilization.

Do not fill containers with nutrient medium completely to the brim. To the borders of the sides, you need to leave about 5 cm of the height of the walls. This free space is very useful when you need to add soil to bare roots. Before planting cucumbers, the soil should be watered abundantly with water.

Choosing a variety for indoor beds

The success of growing cucumbers in indoor conditions largely depends on a well-chosen variety. This requires parthenocarpic cultures - those that do not require pollination. In addition, when sowing in winter, when it is cloudy outside and in conditions of short daylight hours, it is important that the variety is shade-tolerant.

A good solution would be to choose for sowing in room conditions those varieties that are used for greenhouses, early ripening varieties. The cultivar must have good hardiness, be adaptable to temperature fluctuations, low light conditions and limited soil feeding. These characteristics are more characteristic of hybrid varieties. A package with this seed is easily recognizable by the F1 marking on the package. The disadvantage of these crops is that they cannot be used for seed production. However, the harvest from them is excellent.

For those who, in addition to growing cucumbers in room conditions, conduct an experiment with collecting canopy, we recommend the time-tested variety Room Rytova. In addition, such specimens as Marfinsky, Domashny, Rossiyskiy, Polyplodny are popular.