I do not have what you’d call a green thumb, but after years of trial and error, I managed to grow lettuce, beans, and cucumbers last summer. My three zucchini plants, however, yielded only one fruit, total, despite a multitude of ravishing yellow blossoms.
This year, as I gazed upon the first of my two robust, spreading plants to flower, I decided to do some research. Believe it or not, you can type the cryptic phrase “zucchini flowers no fruit” into Google and get a coherent answer. In fact, I found several gardening forums that explained my problem — and what to do about it — in detail.
First of all, zucchini plants have separate male and female flowers, and the male ones tend to arrive first. And, at least on my plants, most of the time, there’s just one open flower per day. This arrangement sounds dubious, but the theory is, it encourages cross-pollination and thereby, genetic variation. Or else someone made a mistake.
Secondly, the flowers open in the morning, and the sun dries out the pollen by afternoon. Therefore, pollination has to take place early in the day — just when gardeners like me are watering, which washes the pollen off the stamens, effectively neutering the blossoms.
Even if I don’t water in the morning, I’m not sure about the chances of the pollen from plant A getting transported by an insect to the lone female flower on plant B, which I naively placed at the other end of the garden. Luckily, there’s a way to bypass the laws of chance, and it’s called hand-pollination.
It’s very easy. In the morning, you find a male flower, which has a slender stem, and roll a Q-tip (or an artist’s paintbrush) across its stamen. The Q-tip comes away covered with sticky yellow pollen. You walk over to a female flower, which has a thick stem that looks like a baby zucchini, and rub the Q-tip across the bumpy, furrowed platform that is the end of the female pistil, and the pollen sticks to it. That’s it!
When I explained this process to my husband, he thought it was a little creepy, but I am thrilled. Every morning, I check to see which genders have exposed their private parts to the sunlight, and I transfer the pollen. The day after my first attempt, the baby zucchini stem had almost doubled in size!
A month later, I have eaten only three squashes, but that’s better than one, or zero, and they were beauties. Even more important — I have a sense of power, having resolved the reproductive mystery of zucchini. Next year I will be sure to plant more than two zucchini plants, and they will be right next to each other. Maybe they’ll even be able to have sex on their own.
