Want to save your cucumber seeds so you don't have to buy them next year?  The first step is to let one of your cucumbers grow bigger and bigger until it turns yellow.

Not quite....

Now they're ready!  For best results, let each cucumber sit for a week after removing it from the vine, then...

...slice the cucumber in half...

...and pull out the guts with your finger.

The seeds are enclosed in little sacs of gel, which is a clue that they're not ready to dry as is.  First you need to ferment the gel sacs off the way you do when saving tomato seeds.

Just pour some water into the container with your cucumber seeds and ignore the cup for a few days until all the seeds fall to the bottom.  You may need to stir gently with a spoon to make the seeds drop out of suspension.  Mold on top of the water is a good sign, signalling that your seeds are ready, but a foul smell means you waited too long.  You can still harvest the seeds once the water starts to stink, but your husband will (rightly) complain about the noxious scent in the kitchen.

Skim off the mold and carefully pour off the water, then rinse the seeds a few times.  Finally, let the seeds dry and examine what you've got.  Many cucumber varieties (like the one I tried to save seed from) are parthenocarpic, which means that the female flowers with produce fruit without being fertilized by pollen from a male flower.  Parthenocarpic cucumbers are great in the garden since they tend to produce fruits earlier than other varieties, but these cucumbers' seeds will end up looking like the ones shown here --- very flat and small and not viable.  I guess I need to find another variety of cucumber if I want to save the seeds!

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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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