Seeding Cucumbers into Plastic Mulch

The question is how do we plant seeds into the plastic mulch. It works real slick for the larger seeds like the corn seed, squash, melons and cucumbers which is what we will show you today. It is harder to do the smaller lettuce and carrot seed. But “where there’s a will there’s a way” is a very true statement. People used to tell us that we couldn’t have early corn in our zone 5 part of the country so of course I had to figure out a way to have my corn ripe first and beat the neighbor, kinda of a game or challenge you might say. And that is how this whole business began of learning how to garden for early season harvest…

When the weather warms up to 70 degrees during the day and not too cold at night then we can begin to seed directly into the garden. We like the seeds to show their heads above the ground in about 5 days or they will rot and then the bugs tend to find them. The first thing I have to do is find the seeper hole at the beginning of the row in the t-tape. So I pull the plastic down from the mainline and look until I find the first hole in the t-tape, then I measure 12 inches using the trowel for a measure and slice a hole in the plastic perpendicular to the t-tape. With the trowel I make a cross cut, a + in the plastic and pull the hole apart to make it larger. Then I make sure that the next seeper hole is in the middle of that cut.

Continuing on down the row every foot and checking each hole to make sure that the seeper is directly in the middle of the hole I measure with the trowel and squeeze each seeper hole so that I can see it. If the t-tape is turned on this job is easier because you can see the wet drippy place.

After slicing the plastic apart I stretch it some and dig out a 2 inch deep hole and throw the dirt off to the side to use later to cover the seed. If I was not able to turn water onto the specific row that I want to plant, then I come back down the row and fill each hole with some water. When the water seeps into the dirt this leaves a muddy hole. I press one slicing cucumber seed into each muddy hole and cover with dirt about 1/2 inch deep. For pickling cucumbers and melons we seed 5 seeds per hole in a domino type pattern with the holes 3 feet apart.

Related:

• Seeding Potatoes into the Plastic Mulch
• Transplanting Bean Sprouts into Plastic Mulch
• Seeding Garlic Cloves

That’s all there is to it. If the weather stays warm they should be up in 5 days to a week.