[gary43]

growing cucumber melonie. these have a couple of female flowers/cucumbers.
but many male flowers. so should i remove all of these?
bit confused as read alsorts, remove them, dont remove them?
just crazy that the packet is no help, and can not find a definative answer on the internet.

[Trillium]

Personally, I don't get uptight over male/female flowers on my cukes. If you've the time, you can pluck off the male flowers as they're no further use but if you can't be bothered, then just leave them and they'll die off on their own time. Just keep the plants watered regularly and side feed once in a while so the fruits won't suffer. I find there's so many garden jobs to do rather than fuss with pulling off flowers.

[mumofstig]

If the packet doesn't tell you to remove them...............then I'd leave them alone.

[spicemistress]

I have had the same thing happen with my Melonie cukes, only worse. I had exactly one female flower early on (and this is for four large vines), but NONE since. The vines are healthy and large, and there have been hundreds of male flowers, but not a single female since. I have tried picking off make flowers (open and buds) and it doesn't make any difference. I got this variety because it sounded tasty, but if you never get any fruit, it doesn't matter how good the catalog makes it sound. I will not get this variety again. If anyone has any suggestions how to kick these vines into making female flowers, I'd appreciate hearing it.

[JayG]

How frustrating!

Can't help wondering whether repeatedly removing male buds/flowers isn't spurring them on to produce more and more replacement males at the expense of female flowers.

That is just a thought; I've no experience of growing this variety (in general I specialise in killing cucumber plants, or perhaps I should say "assisted suicide"!)

[spicemistress]

LOL -- I have a few plants I don't assist with suicide any more... But I've actually tried the experiment with picking and NOT picking the male flowers off (I thought it would be good to have at least one plant with lots of flowers to get the pollinators coming into the greenhouse)... doesn't help. Today I tried picking a few leaves off one plant in the hope this would shock it into making female flowers. I'm not optimistic this will work either....

[1st time veg grower]

I have no flowers on my melonie cucumbers...of any variety, male or female! Just lots of foliage, its v frustrating!

[grey-mouse]

I'm growing 2 Melonie and 2 Socrates - the Melonie only have male flowers and the Socrates are covered in cucumbers.

Just spoken to a very helpful lady at Unwins and she says thay have had calls about this problem with Melonie. It is too hot for them and when stressed they put out male flowers. She said that the male flowers should be removed and to try to cool the greenhouse down by having doors and windows open.

Can now only wait & hope it cools down a little for them.

[spicemistress]

Many thanks, GreyMouse. I may just try putting one of my plants outside. I have nothing to lose at this point but a non-productive vine.

[grey-mouse]

Despite having countless male flowers I noticed earlier that I have 2 female flowers, each has a very furry cucumber behind them. The temperature has been cooler for the last few days so maybe this has helped.

I hope that I end up with more than just 2 cucumbers.

[spicemistress]

Hey! Me too! I've got one nice long cuke coming on and one itsy-bitsy furry one. I hand-pollinated that one... since I had so many male flowers on hand. But there are no more female flowers in sight at this point, so it's looking like there will be just the two (assuming the second one hangs in there...) They had sure better taste special to be worth all the effort it's taken to get them!

[1st time veg grower]

Still got loads of foliage but absolutely no flowers...had LOADS of outdoor ones now, so not sure these were worth it!

[spicemistress]

I'm letting my two grow to full size, and I'll see what they taste like, but given the ridiculous productivity, I'm not going to get 'melonie' again and would not recommend it to anyone.