So your first bright yellow flowers have just arrived on your cucumber plant and now you are excitedly salivating over the thought of those first few juicy cucumbers. But just how long are you going to have to wait for a fully-fledged cucumber to form? Luckily for you, not long at all, I find the fruit is normally fully developed around two weeks after first appearing.
How long until the plant starts flowering
From seeding to flowers is roughly around ten weeks. There are a lot of different factors that can affect this and there are ways of speeding it up.
Cucumbers are quick-growing plants and with a little encouragement you can bring this time down to around 8 weeks. By encouragement, I mean things like starting the seeds in a propagator and getting them heated if still early in the season. This will encourage strong growth initially and speed up the entire process.
You can also ensure they are in high-quality compost with lots of nutrients as this will also speed up growth.
How long after flowering does the cucumber appear
The cucumber is actually there all along. Only female cucumber flowers actually produce fruit and these can easily be identified as they have the fruit already there behind the flower. Male flowers will never produce fruit and are there only for fertilisation.
So you can see the baby cucumber behind the female flower. As you can see this flower hasn’t even opened up yet and still the cucumber is there.
These cucumbers will then continue to grow and will be ready to harvest in around 2 weeks.
It is essential during this fruit-producing cycle of the plant that you try and eliminate any stress on the plant. This can lead to bitter tasting cucumbers, a topic I discuss in more detail here.
In the above photo, you can see a nearly ready cucumber that just has a little more growing to do before being ready. I estimate only a couple more days until this one is ready to go.
