This will make the 9th squash I've had to toss. 3rd photo. The ends get all soft and rot. Every. Single. One. I've heard this is because of not getting pollinated.
Last year I lost 8 plants to vine borers. I've got everything I need to stop that, injection needle, B.T. and using a few other methods like Sevin dust around the stem. A man on a mission. But for what? To keep plants alive and toss every fruit.
All that work to save the plants and getting zero edible fruits. Is that where we are? I have to hand pollinate every single female flower?
I'm not one to give up, but frustration is starting to get the best of me. For goodness sakes squash. Stop being the little selfish b**ch of my garden. It's a beautiful garden and you're making me hate the 4×8 area you've consumed without giving back.
Is there something I'm missing here?
by Try2HardTimmi
26 Comments
Could try growing something that bees go crazy for in the middle of the bed like borage, so they cross the squash on the way. Or you can always self pollinate.
Hand pollination is the way to go. You can even harvest and keep the pollen for when you have a flower ready, then use a qtip, dip in the collected pollen you have and pollinate the flower, I did that with my zucchini last year, got a ton of them
I struggled for about a month last year then started hand pollinating and stopped having this same issue
Ditto on hand pollination. Just grab a male bloom and use that to fertilize the female blossom.
Also consider rampicante which is supposed to be resistant to SVB. The immature fruit can be used like zucchini and the mature fruit can be stored and eaten like butternut .
I’ve had to hand pollinate all of my squash plants. I’ve also had a hard time with time. Try planing a different variety and look into injectables for squash vine borers.
I have chamomile and lavender. Bees love my backyard.
But vine borers also love my backyard so…
Fucking vine borers and cucumber beetles had me abandon cucurbits all together.
Big fan of hand pollinating. The flowers bloom in the morning and it’s one of my fav things to go out on a little garden walk first thing in the morning with my coffee to hand pollinate and check out all my plants.
I take an old (but washed) small eye makeup or paint brush and scoop some pollen from male flowers to female flowers. I cross pollinate varieties because I don’t save seeds from squash.
If there’s a ton of male flowers but no female (generally happens early in the season) I’ll grab a male flower with heavy pollen in it and stick it in a plastic baggy in the fridge. It’ll last a few days which often is enough time for at least one of your plants to decide it’s time to put on a flush of female flowers, so I’ll use that to pollinate them.
We call it squash sex lol.
Taking an electric toothbrush or a Q-tip and rub the mail flowers and then rub the female flowers
It could also be a calcium deficiency. My tip for hand pollinating is removing a male flower from the plant and using it to pollinate your female flowers. They make SO much pollen, you can even keep male blooms in the fridge for a few days if they don’t bloom alongside female flowers.
BLOSSOM END ROT
Needs a lime slurry to save next series of fruit
Bees are very susceptible to sevin. As are other pollinating insects. By trying to combat the borers you may have decimated the pollinators. I daily check for borer eggs and spray BT every 3-4 days and this has worked for me. Before I did this the borers got my plants every time. The best thing to put on your garden is your shadow, as they say.
If you’re having pollination issues, consider giving up some of your space to native plants for native bees and insects to frequent.
Also consider direct sowing things like lacy phacelia, sweet alyssum, and other flowering plants in and around your crops to draw in pollinators, predatory braconid wasps, lacewings, lady beetles, and more.
An added tip on hand pollination, if a given plant doesn’t any male blossoms, a male blossom from a plant of any variety in the same species will work.
Example: you can pollinate a zucchini with a male acorn squash flower (both cucurbita pepo).
The current generation fruit will be of the desired variety, but seeds grown from cross pollinated fruits will be hybrids.
Blossom end rot. That happened to me a couple years ago from a lack of calcium in my soil. I just sprinkled crushed up tums around them and watered as normal and that cleared it up. Mix some crushed egg shells into your compost for next season.
I’ve planted over 20 squash plants in three waves so far. I lost my 7th plant yesterday and have two stunted ones in quaratine that barely survived a bore attack. I look for SVB eggs every day and for the past 4 weeks have been using spinosad. With what seems like decent results. But then again in Texas there are multiple life cycles of these months and I may just be in a period of calm before the next storm. We also had a full week straight of heavy rain that caused all my flowers to drop off the plants and squash to shrivel up. But so far I’m harvesting tons of yellow squash but only have 3 zucchini plants left that just now started producing again after the heavy rains. Squash are good times let me tell you.
I personally don’t waste my time on summer squash, so many people grow it and always have too much so it’s really easy to find at markets and I always have people at work and around giving it away sometimes. I do grow winter squash and just tend to let it take over the yard and it does fine where it grows. I had a problem with squash bugs but I think I had enough plants that it didn’t affect the yield much. If you have something else you’d rather grow then I’d do that instead of going through the trouble
Do you have many flowers to attract pollinators? Make some mason bee houses around your garden. They are hard core pollinators.
I just pluck a male bloom and make it fuck some female blooms and then I have a cigarette
Cut the brown end off and eat it I have Done this for 25+ years
I just pull a male flower stem, rip the flower part off and use the inside to go to each female flower and pollinate. Then you get squash. If you don’t, early season is tough. Later there are more flowers in the garden to attract pollinators right now I only have a few. I do this especially on a rainy morning, to be sure I get some.
I have to hand pollinate every one of mine by hand to get fruit
How do you know the difference between male and female flower stems?
9th squash of how many plants?
The first 1-3 squash on all my plants turns out like this, even with hand pollination. But then the rest are good!
https://preview.redd.it/knj4se2uv82f1.jpeg?width=1201&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5143f7c52e36db41ee2e22097bb7810312c4d659
See the difference between male and female flowers. You can use a Q tip or a paintbrush to pollinate the female. If you have excess male flowers you can take some of them off as well to stimulate more female flowers to grow.
By using sevin to kill off SVB, you’ve also killed off pollinators.
Next time go easy on the insecticides, plant moschata varieties (more resistant to SVB) and instead of dusting the stem with poison, use aluminium foil to protect it and plant a few native flowers to attract pollinators.
For now your only choice is hand pollination indeed.