If you’re growing flowers, vegetables, or fruits, you likely care about them. You have to care for them, water them, and trim them when they overgrow. But you begin to wonder if your plants have feelings. When you’re ready to trim your cucumber, you might wonder, do cucumbers scream when you cut them?
No, cucumbers do not scream when you cut them. Plants do not make any noise that the human ear can hear when they are cut or harvested.
You, like everyone else, might have worried at one point if you were hurting your vegetables when you cut or pick them. If you want to learn more about this, keep on reading to learn more – though you might still have to come to your own conclusions!
Can Cucumbers Feel Pain
Cucumbers don’t feel pain, which is why they do not scream when you cut them.
Cucumbers are plants and, as I’ll later argue, alive, but they do not feel pain.
Cucumbers do not have nerves, a brain, or receptors that cause you to feel pain. Those are a little important for that, huh?
You will not see your cucumber plants wince in pain, reel after being cut, or grab their lopped off stem.
Now, some scientists study plants and will say that they somehow exhibit symptoms of being in pain. For instance, if you cut off the wrong part of a plant, your plant could start to wilt and die off. Is that a sign of pain? That’s just something that you’ll have to decide for yourself!
You can’t go screaming from pain if you don’t have any vocal cords, right? More on that one later, though.
Do Cucumbers Cry From Pain When Being Cut
Some scientists believe that cucumbers cry from pain, but it won’t be something that you’ll be able to hear.
You can go down the Google rabbit hole and find studies that say that cucumbers and other vegetable plants emit a sound when they are cut that “warns” other plants that they have been cut.
However, the sound is so quiet that you’ll never be able to hear it without a special device.
If this is true, here are some questions about this:
- What will the warned plants do? They can’t run away!
- How is the plant making those sounds if there are no vocal cords?
- Do all plants speak the same “language?”
- How do cucumber plants learn to speak?
- Do cucumber plants make other noises when something else happens?
Let’s take a step back for a second. You might assume that cucumbers don’t cry, but let me play devil’s advocate for a moment.
If you cut a cucumber stem, have you ever noticed that the stem oozes a little bit. You might touch it and realize that it feels sticky or watery.
Can you count that as tears? I think that’s something up to you to decide!
What Do Cucumbers Feel When You Cut Them
Cucumbers do not feel anything when you cut them.
Whether or not there is a noise from your cucumber, you might wonder what cucumbers feel when you cut them.
The easiest answer to this question is this: we don’t know.
We can’t ask cucumbers what they feel after they’re cut, so it’s impossible to know what they feel when you cut them.
How do we know that cats and dogs feel pain if they can’t talk to us either?
Well, cats and dogs can make noises and show us that they are in pain. A dog may howl when they hurt themselves, and your cat may start to limp around if they hurt their paw.
Unfortunately, you’ll never hear your cucumber plant scream or watch them flinch when you chop off one of the cucumbers.
Are Cucumbers Alive
Yes, cucumbers are alive. All plants are alive.
Cucumber plants – and all plants – are alive, though they don’t exhibit the same behavior as humans and animals.
Like all other living things, cucumbers need nutrients to survive. Cucumbers have reproduced too. They can even die.
Eating And Needing Nutrients
Plants need to eat and need to be watered.
If you want a healthy cucumber plant that produces juicy cucumbers, then your cucumber plants need nourishment.
Now, you might not be someone who likes to feed your plants. Your plant can still get nutrients from the soil that it is in.
Your cucumber might not get the proper nutrients, though, and you’ll see that your cucumber plant will start to suffer. It may not produce cucumbers fast or big enough.
Water is, likewise, necessary for your cucumber plant. Your cucumber plant will quickly wilt if there isn’t enough water.
Its leaves will wilt, and its produce will not be as big as it could be.
Reproducing
Plants reproduce!
Your plant won’t be reproducing in the same way as people or animals.
Cucumber plants reproduce with pollen. The plants have male and female flowers.
The male flowers supply the pollen that the female flowers need to grow the fruit. There isn’t any sex, though – the bees do the heavy lifting to carry the pollen from the male flower to the female flower.
Let’s think of living organisms. Most of the time, the male has the sperm which impregnates the female.
Dying
Plants die, just like they grow, eat, and reproduce.
If you aren’t much of a gardener, you’re familiar with dead plants. Some people can’t keep them alive if their own life depended on it!
Plants live, and plants die.
It’s a natural part of the lifecycle of cucumber plants, just as it is with any other living organism.
Death is always sad, but there is just something worse about your cucumber plant dying after you spent all summer trying to keep it happy!
When you take into eating, having kids, and eventually dying, don’t plants sound like they’re alive? Those are three essential things that make a living organism, well, alive, right?
Hi there, my name is Allie and welcome to my blog; GareningWithAllie!
Much of what you see written here is just our personal experiences with gardening. Along with the content I write here, there is also a unique collection of gardening topics covered by some of our close friends. I hope you find everything you read here to be helpful, informative, and something that can make your gardening journey the most lovely experience ever! With that said, Happy Gardening!