Random Thursday: Sex in the Garden

[hrj]

Ok, wherever you think I was going with that subject line, you're probably wrong. Unless you've been following my facebook posts about manual pollination of my squashes.

The theory is that you plant a few zucchini plants and then one day you turn around and find you need to surreptitiously leave bushels of zucchinis on your neighbors' porches to get rid of them. Interesting theory. I have yet to see it happen. Over the last several years, I think I've averaged fewer than one mature squash per plant. In discussing the behavior of the plants with various other amateur gardeners, the best diagnosis seemed to be a failure of pollination. The plants would flower, but the fruits would turn yellow and fall off rather than growing.

Since I've tried all imaginable combinations of location, sun exposure, and plant density, and since I don't seem to have any problem with other plants getting pollinated (see, e.g., my cucumber abundance), I figured the only thing left to try for diagnosis was artificial insemination. So now it's become a routine part of my near-daily garden tour to look for new female flowers on the squashes at the flowering stage. Keep in mind that I'm usually doing my tour in the evening, when squash blossoms have closed for the night.But it's fairly easy to tell a never-opened flower from one that has opened and closed again. (My, my, is it getting warm in here?)

Then it's just a matter of finding a male flower on the same plant (or at least on a very closely related variety), picking it, stripping it down to the sex organs, then teasing the female flower open enough to apply pollen. Stroking, and rubbing and...oh, yes, *ahem*, where was I?

It's hard to tell how effective it's being, I'll need a few more weeks to get a sense. I've picked one pattypan squash already. There's an acorn squash that has grown substantially but is withering a little and should probably be picked way too early if I don't want to lose it entirely. One hubbard that looks to be holding strong. There are a couple of spagghetti squashes that have definitely "taken". Half a dozen crooknecks that I'm still holding my breath on. And one plant that doesn't seem to have thrown off any female flowers yet.

The cucumbers, on the other hand, seem to be doing quite well on their own.

Comments

[soon_lee]

With bees declining, hand-pollinating might be in all our futures.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I got as far as "..oh, yes, *ahem*, where was I?" and laughed enough to be asked "what's so funny?". Got some raised eyebrows when I said that I wad reading a rather graphic description of hand polination.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Though now I wonder how one tells male flowers from female, and if it matters how the blosoms identity...

[hrj.livejournal.com]

For the squash family, the female flowers that produce the fruit have a clearly visible "proto-squash" at the base of the flower. (Many plants don't have separate male and female flowers.)

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

It is sorta bizarre that the cucumbers would have no trouble pollinating while the squash can't manage it, in the same garden.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

One observable difference is that the cucumber flowers don't close at night. So the squashes have a smaller window of availability, and it requires both male and female flowers to be open during the same window.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Last year I tried container gardening, including a yellow squash and a zucchini. The pumpkin never did well. The squashes gave me...five or six, total, over the course of the summer.

[sacchig.livejournal.com]

I'm an old hand at twiddling squash blossoms, although just the earliest ones--after that the pollinators get right to work.