No Male Blossoms

Question

Hi Everyone. Our butternut squash has just started to blossom. At the same time, we have a gold skin zucchinni that almost died when the weather turned hot (100+), but I managed to save it and now it is FULL of blossom buds. Some of them are actually blooming. The only weird thing is that all of the blossoms are female – on both the butternut and the zucchinni. How do I encourage more male blossoms? Can that even be done?

Thank you all again for your help!

– Janine

Answer 1

That is quite a good thing to have happen!!! Usually it is the other way around, and you get mostly male blossoms, and have to wait for females.

What you will have to do is to wait for a flower without a miniature fruit (the male flower) to pop out. Take this flower, once it opens, and save it in a bag once it is completely dry. You can use this to paint the pollen on some of the flowers with a paintbrush. Once you do that, the tiny fruit will swell and grow into your fruit.

Alternatively you may be surprised to find, despite having all female flowers, that some of those female flowers start to swell from being pollinated from insects that have visited other compatible pollen donors.

This article will give you more information on the care of these plants: https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/squash/growing-butternut-squash.htm