Growing Your Own Cucumbers in Deep Water Culture Hydroponics
Growing hydroponic cucumbers is fun and rewarding. Healthy cucumber plants tend to be thirsty and cucumber roots love plenty of air to breathe; making them ideal candidates for water culture systems like Deep Water Culture hydroponics. Cucumbers grown in hydroponic water culture systems are exceptionally sweet and crisp with mild tasting skins. No need to peel before enjoying in salads or even as a crisp cool sandwich topper.
Hydroponic cucumber plants produce abundantly. A single well developed hydroponic cucumber plant receiving favorable conditions can easily produce enough harvests of high quality fruits to supply an average household. While cucumbers are a warm season crop for outdoors, they can be grown year round indoors under grow lights or in a climate controlled greenhouse. The rewards are bountiful and growing hydroponic cucumbers can be one of the easier crops you’ll likely cultivate.
Unlike some types of garden plants that require lots of pruning, training, fruit thinning ,etc, cucumber plants tend to be pretty low maintenance when grown adeptly in a healthy environment. A good quality DWC (deep water culture) system does most of the work, keeping plants fed and watered while promoting healthy longevity in root systems due to the amount of aeration the roots receive via an aquarium air pump and air stones. Even un-aerated Kratky style water culture systems tend to produce well.
As long as hydroponic cucumber plants are getting plenty of warm weather, light, gentle air movement and moderate humidity levels are maintained the only real work is trellising to support the vines up. When growing hydroponic cucumbers, they can get heavy when loaded with ripening fruits!
Besides traditional salad cucumbers, there are lots of interesting and worthwhile cucurbit cultivars to experiment with. Besides popular alternatives like long english or pickling cucumbers, there’s some really interesting varieties to have some fun with like lemon cucumbers, Japanese cucumbers, Persian cucumbers and more.
Interesting Facts About Cucumbers:
- Cucumbers are in fact “fruits”, not vegetables.
- The fruits are about 95% water.
- Cucumbers are thought to have a “cooling effect” on the body.
- Most of the flavour in a cucumber comes from the seeds.
- A plant can produce over 100+ fruits.
Starting Hydroponic Cucumber Seeds
- Start more seeds than the number of plants you desire and select the best for production.
- Germinate seeds in soilless propagation plugs like rockwool or compostable peat or coco based. Keep the germination medium moist but not saturated.
- DO NOT ALLOW TO DRY OUT DURING GERMINATION.
- Maintain warmer temperatures from 75 to 80 deg F in the germination trays.
- No fertilizer is necessary for germinating seeds and can stunt early development.
- Once seedlings have emerged they will need gentle even lighting.
- After the first true leaves develop, begin feeding with a ¼ strength fertilizer solution.
- Following sufficient roots developed, seedlings will be ready transplant into aeroponic or hydroponic water culture systems.
