Plenty of Male Flowers - No Females
 

I have a couple of GadZooks Zucchini growing well. Have had male flowers for over a week. No female flowers. Is there anything I can do to encourage female flowers?

MikeInCypress

Male flowers always appear first. Be patient and you will soon see the females.

Make squash blossom pasta while you wait! :yes:

It's normal for lots of male flowers to grow first. People usually pick most of them and sauté them in olive oil. Your zucchini sound healthy so just relax and wait. The girls will be along. They just like to take their sweet time about it. You know how we girls like to make an entrance! LOL!

Rarely, but it happens, I hear people get loads of male flowers with the female flowers showing up very late. This can lead to poor production, if the males are mostly gone when the females show up.

I'll start one plant about 10-14 days later than all of the others, to avoid this.

Gary

Have the male flowers put their hat on right, clean up, stay off the phone, pull their pants up, get the stupid blue tooth contraption out of their ear, and most of all tell the female flowers how pretty they are in their new yellow dress and more female flowers will show up.:lol:

Worth

Don't strip off all the males, the bees need to get in the habit of stopping by before the female flowers show up

((Worth)) - that's for your #6 post!!

The last three years growing Zucchini I had the same experience -- lots of male flowers at the beginning with female flowers showing up a week or two later. This year I'm seeing the opposite -- several female flowers on each plant with their mini zucchini base, and the males are still tiny little buds.

I'm seeing the opposite this year also, for zucchini. Females out early, no males for almost two weeks after the first female. For squash plants the males appeared before females.

It'll be interesting to see how the Zucchini do this year given this. I have two plants of Striatto d'Italia from the same seed packet as the plants I grew last two years, and two plants of Green Tiger. Both varieties are behaving this way so I'm guessing it's environmental??

And the local CSA located two miles from me just announced that they will have zucchini available by Thursday. I guess they must have started their earlier than I did! I'll have to ask the farmer about her Zucchini's growing behavior.

I also mentioned on another thread that I have seen scant pollenators flying around the garden. I may be hand-pollenizing zukes, cukes, squash, and eggplant!