Squash / Succhini pollination?
7:53 am in Plants, Seeking Advice by Trygve Henriksen
Does anyone have any experience with Squash / Succhini?
I have two of a ‘midnight’(miniature) variety in my WF.
(Picture in this post: http://our.windowfarms.org/2010/10/23/update-on-my-wf/ )
Both have grown to decent size and bloomed many times, but I have been unable to get them pollinated.
Is there a special trick to this?
Did you try tickling the pollen centers with a small paintbrush already?
I messed about with a q-tip, does that count?
Do you know how long time I have from the flower opens until it’s too late?
keep trying until the flower withers, at that point it will either go to fruit or just fall off. And a q-tip should work, maybe try pollinating between flowers? Collect pollen on the q-tip then spread it across the other flowers.
I have no direct experience, but I thought I would post up some links on the subject for reference. All I know is what I read on the internet….
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/gourds/msg0611545713356.html
http://www.pollinator.com/squash.htm
http://www.pollinator.com/hand_pollination2.htm
http://walterreeves.com/food_gardening/article.phtml?cat=3&id=475
@gadgetman. I posted a reply just now and it got stuck in “Moderation”. I think I put too many links in it. However, as the author of the post you should be able to directly approve them. I know it worked for me when I posted items and I was able to approve comments that got stuck in moderation.
Some more good reading. The 2nd large section talks about the timing of the pollination. http://ag.udel.edu/enwc/faculty/dmcaron/Pollination/gourds.html
You have to think like a bee…
Thanks for the reading material… I think…
Seems there’s supposed to be two distinctly different flowers on these plants. and that the window of opportunity isn’t all that long. It just may be that Squash isn’t the right plants for me.
Hey, I hope you are not going to give up on the Squash. Have you been able to tell if you have any female flowers yet? I think it said the male flowers typically come in first.
Frankly, it looks like I’ve only gotten male flowers, yet…
And there’s been around a doen of those on each of my two plants, so it’s about time I get a couple of female flowers.
(No idea why I haven’tgotten any, yet. Maybe it’s the nutes, the PC, general air humidity, temparature… )
Even if these fails, I have seeds for a couple of other varieties, a ‘spaghetti’ variety among them, which’ll go on my verandah next summer.
I hope you’ve eaten the flowers – a steady supply of zucchini/squash flowers will sound like heaven to quite a few hobby chefs !
It’s probably too late but you could try playing some soft music and get a few candles burning. If you are lucky enough to get the male and female flowers blooming at the same time, get a watercolor paintbrush and collect the pollen from the male and brush it on the female flower. Good luck.
Yeah, it’s too late…
The two plants I had didn’t survive the cold and low humidity during xmas.
(I was away and had left the heating in ‘frostguard’ mode, so it never got above 10degrees celsius, probably closer to 5, for a whole week… Air humidity was probably below 20% the whole period, too)
Incidentally, I never saw any female flowers…