I'm still on the fence about whether Mexican sour gherkins will be a permanent addition to our garden, but since the seeds are so expensive, I decided to save some just in case.  With no seed saving information on the internet, I merged a tutorial on saving cucumber seeds with my own observations on the natural history of the Mexican sour gherkin to come up with the experimental protocol below.

First, I left some of the earliest fruits on the vine to see what would happen.  When saving cucumber seeds, you're supposed to leave a cucumber on the vine until it turns yellow and is fully matured, but Mexican sour gherkins never seem to turn yellow (although they do take on a yellowish cast.)  Instead, after a while they drop to the ground.  I figured these fallen fruits must be mature, and gathered them for my seed-saving experiment.

Cutting open one of the fallen gherkins, I could see that the seeds now made up nearly the entire interior of the fruit.  I squeezed out the guts of several fruits by poking a finger in each half.  Like tomato seeds, these gherkin seeds were surrounded by a frog-egg-like sack of fluid that must be fermented away before the seeds can be saved.  So I poured some water into the cup with my gherkin guts and left it alone.

The internet reports that the sack will have fermented away from cucumber seeds within three days, but my experience has shown that these sacks tend to take about a week to deteriorate in cool weather.  Sure enough, a week later, the water in my cup had become milky and, when swished, I could see bare seeds settled at the bottom.  So I carefully poured off the water, rinsed the seeds in another round of water, then turned them out onto a saucer to dry.

I'm very good at remembering to save seeds, but once they get to the drying stage, they tend to accumulate in jelly jars, cups, pans, saucers, and bowls in a long row along our windowsill.  I finally got around to putting away tomato, cantaloupe, watermelon, garbanzo, drying bean, urd bean, okra, pepper, and poppy seeds while taking photos for this post --- see, a blog is good for something.  Check out last year's lunchtime series for more tips on which seeds are easy to save and how to start your own seed saving campaign.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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