Cucumber Percentages

Here is an activity you can try with your plants. Just for this example, we will use a cucumber plant. The flowers plants produce will eventually become the fruit, or in this case, a cucumber. Gently and loosely place tape around the stems of flowers you find on your cucumber plant. In a few weeks, come back and look to see how many of the flowers are generating a cucumber. What percentage of the taped flowers now have fruit? For example, out of 5 flowers, now 3 have fruit growing. To find the percent, have the 3 exisiting fruit as the numerator and the 5 original flowers as the denominator. This equals 0.6, which is equal to 60% of the flowers producing fruit!