Sex in the Garden: Male Zucchini: All Flowers No Squash

I had big failure with zucchini last year. The plants were small and I now know that I put them in too small a container. I got a few flowers and some squash started to grow, but they got all sick and mushy before they mature. It was a total loss.

This year, I used a 3 gallon container, planted 2 plants in it and got squash-plants-zilla:

Zucchini Plants are huge

The plant is beautiful. It even got lots of flowers. The problem is that the flowers are falling off and not creating any actual zucchini squash.

Part of the reason for my zucchini flower loss is storm damage. However, I have also lost flowers absent wind and rain, so I decided to do a little research. It turns out that zucchini flowers are either male or female. The male flowers produce pollen, but do not grow squash. Only female flowers create squash. My small, squishy-squash from last year could have been immature due to underpollination.

Lucky for me, all hope for this years zucchini is not lost. The male blossoms come first, bloom, throw off pollen and fall off. I may get some female blooms yet, and there are a few unopened flowers on the plant. However, I still might not get any zucchini if the female flowers are not sufficiently pollinated. The females need existing male flowers or enough pollen left around the plant from them. They also need bees, butterflies, wind or rain to do the actual pollination. I lack bees and butterflies on the balcony, so I might have to resort to human intervention as sorted as that may sound.

The first trick to pollinating zucchini flowers is to tell the boys from the girls. The second trick is to figure out the easiest way to get the pollen from the male flower to the female. I found the details on this blog and zucchini are remarkably not too very dissimilar from other species.

I might be too late for my plants, but tomorrow when the remaining flowers open, I"m going to give it a looksee.

Here's what my plant should be looking like at this point (courtesy the Chicago Botanic Garden and my handy camera):

CBG has zucchini.