Why cucumbers are empty inside: reasons for what to do

There are perfectly understandable reasons why cucumbers are empty inside. If such a misfortune happened to the harvest, next season you need to work on the mistakes. Here are the main areas to pay attention to when growing cucumbers:

microclimate;
watering;
soil quality and balanced nutrition;
varietal characteristics and timely harvest;
illness.

We will deal with each item separately in order to understand our mistakes and not repeat them again. These factors affect the quality of fruits when growing cucumbers both in open ground and in a greenhouse.

Harvesting and variety characteristics

Summer residents, who rarely come to their country house, collect hollow cucumbers more often than others. During the peak of fruiting, the collection of young cucumbers should be carried out every day or at least every other day. Harvesting once every 5 - 7 days leads to the fact that greens overripe and voids appear in them.

The problem can be solved by careful selection of seeds for planting. Hybrids should be preferred. On the package with seeds next to the name should be the designation F1. Most of the newest hybrids do not form hollow fruits from the inside. If you carefully read the description of the variety printed on the package, you can find seeds with the desired characteristics for growing in the greenhouse and in the open field.

When choosing seeds, one more characteristic is important - the purpose of use. According to the value of this characteristic, all varieties (hybrids) are divided into 3 groups:

salad;
universal;
canned food.

Cucumbers for canning purposes are less often hollow, followed by universal ones, most often greenhouse varieties of salad destinations outgrow and become empty.

Microclimate

You can talk about the microclimate when growing a crop in a greenhouse. In the open ground, the humidity and temperature of the air is determined by the weather. A large difference in night and day temperatures in August leads to the fact that cavities form in the fruits.

In protected ground, this problem is not so relevant, in the garden, cucumber beds need to be covered with covering material at night to maintain the optimum temperature at night.

Shelter will improve fruit formation as cucumbers grow at night and plants need temperatures above 20°C to grow.

Irrigation

A very important condition for fruit quality is proper watering. Inadequate watering negatively affects the quality of cucumber pulp. Especially the lack of moisture affects in hot weather. Produces poor performance by abundant watering after a long period of drought.

This problem can be solved in several ways:

organize an automatic drip irrigation system;
cover the soil under the bushes with a layer of mulch (15 cm);
water with a watering can, but regularly, preventing the top layer from drying out.

Mulching the soil not only allows you to retain moisture, but also helps to improve soil structure, which directly affects plant nutrition, and hence the quality of fruits and the density of their pulp. When caring for a crop, you need to remember that soil moisture should be constant and not fall below 75%.

Soil quality and balanced nutrition

With the inept use of organic and mineral fertilizers, you can get a crop of poor quality.

Cucumbers with voids inside are poor raw materials for preparations and not the best product for making salads.

If the pulp of fresh cucumbers has a loose structure, you need to analyze the feeding scheme. Perhaps, by introducing fertilizers into the soil, the balance between nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium was disturbed. Cavities inside fruits occur when there is an excess of nitrogen. Imbalance often occurs when organic matter (manure) and urea are added simultaneously.

To avoid such a problem, when preparing the soil in spring (autumn), apply humus and mineral fertilizers under the cucumbers at the rate. The norm is determined based on the structure of the soil: for different types of soil (loamy, clayey, sandy loam) you need your own proportions of fertilizers.

For a balanced diet of cucumbers, it is better to use complex mineral fertilizers. The ratio of the main nutrients is always indicated on the packaging. It must be remembered that during the formation of ovaries and fruits, the plant needs more potassium, during flowering it needs phosphorus, and nitrogen is needed in the initial period, when there is an active increase in green mass.

Diseases

Cucumber is a crop sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Stress for her is an increase in temperature above 30 ° C and a decrease below 10 ° C. During stress, immunity decreases, the risk of infectious diseases increases.

Cucumbers can develop defects if the bush is infected with a virus. Yield losses from diseases of viral origin are significant. For example, viral necrosis reduces yield by 20%, or even by 50%.

It is possible to avoid the deformity of fruits and the death of plants from viral diseases, subject to certain rules:

crop rotation;
he althy seeds;
viral resistant varieties;
treatment of soil before planting with fungicides;
balanced nutrition and watering.

You can increase the immunity of plants in a greenhouse (soil) with the help of growth regulators, which should be in the arsenal of every summer resident. Applying them in the required proportions, you can get a full harvest even under bad weather conditions.

Removing the reasons why cucumbers are empty inside will help improve the quality of the crop. In winter, the jars will not be shriveled, soft fruits, but elastic and crispy cucumbers.