Hello, my dear friends of the #homesteading community. It's been an amazing weekend and I hope we are all having great times in our different places.
Today, I will be sharing with everyone how one plant can bring forth many of its kind. Let's see what I mean. There are certain plants that one of the fruits could be used to grow many others of that same plant. Let's talk about maize, wheat, millet, rice, pumpkin and even cucumber. So guess what I would be dealing with today.
Cucumber is one of the most selling fruits in my area. This is its planting season, the rainy season. I love cucumber so much due to the crunchy seeds and watery inner part. I love eating it with groundnut, just too amazing. You would love to try it out.
So today, I used a single cucumber fruit to plant many. One cucumber fruit is a potential parent of many other cucumber plants. One cucumber fruit has so many uncountable seeds within it.
So today, I got this cucumber which I had preserved for planting. Looking at the cucumber, it looks very yellowish. This is intentional, when the cucumber fruit turns yellow, this are two messages to pass to anyone in custody of it. First, the fruit is no longer nutritious for consumption and second, the seeds within are mature for planting purposes.
So, yesterday as I just returned from school, I got the cucumber fruit and divided it into different sections to help get the seeds out. I sliced them into almost equal parts and placed them in my seed-planting bowl.
Then, I engaged myself in squeezing out the seeds from the sliced fruit. I noticed that the amount of moisture in the fruit was not as much as it used to be when the fruit was still green and good to eat.
So after a lot of squeezing and pressing to have every seed out of the fruit, I took the bowl containing the seeds and the fruit flesh to my farm.
As I got there, I dug up many holes not too deep. Planting a seed like the cucumber seed, the hole needs not to be too deep for it to survive and germinate. So I dug out little soil giving the holes a little spacing since the cucumber forms a very long vine which may grow and twine themselves.
Then I distributed the seed in pairs of three into every one of the holes I dug up. Just like I said earlier, the hole doesn't have to be too deep and when covering the seed with soil, it should be done mildly and shouldn't be pressed. This helps raise the probability of the seed germination.
After planting all the seeds, I then proceeded to mark them out with a dead maize plant.
I also used the cucumber flesh slices to mark the spots where I planted the seeds. I didn't waste the plant flesh because I knew it would decay to add nutrients to the germinating seeds someday. Marking out these spots would help me or anyone getting into the farm to avoid stepping on those spots and pressing the seeds thickly and deeply into the soil, making germination a thing of low chance.
Thanks for reading. If time permits, I would still have to share my harvesting period with everyone here. That one fruit I used its seed to plant, can offer me thirty fruits. That's why I said, using one fruit to have many fruits.
Enjoy your weekend.