Are you having problems with your cucumbers and squash growing to two or three inches long and then rotting? You may be having pollination problems.
Pollination Insects
Squash and cucumbers have male and female flowers. Bees bring pollen from the male flowers to pollinate the female flowers. With the problems bees have been having with colony collapse disorder and other diseases, there are not enough bees these days to pollinate all the squash and cucumbers. Native pollinators, such as solitary bees and wasps, are also in short supply.
Hand Pollinating Squash and Cucumbers
You can fix this problem by pollinating your squash and cucumbers by hand. It is not hard and will increase your yield considerably. First, you have to find a male flower. The female flowers have a baby fruit at the base of them while the males lack this feature. Carefully pick the male flower. Peel each petal off of the base, shaking the flower as little as possible. What you have left are the stamens, which are covered in pollen.
Apply Pollen To The Female Flower
Take this and brush it against the center part of a female flower. One or two passes will do. Remember to be gentle — bees crawling around on the flower generally do this part and the insides are fragile. You can use one male flower on up to five female flowers. Then you have to pick another male flower and start over.
Increased Yield
That is all there is to pollinating your squash and cucumbers by hand. You should see an increase in yields with this method if you do not have enough bees to pollinate the plants for you.
Squash Bees
If you wish to avoid hand pollinating your squash and cucumbers, you can give squash bees a space of packed dirt near the squash to nest in. Squash bees build chambers underground and lay eggs with some squash pollen and nectar in each chamber. The bees live underground until it is time for the squash to bloom. Each female blossom opens for one day. If it isn’t pollinated that day, the fruits drop off. Squash bees are superior pollinators of squash and cucumbers. While bumble bees and honey bees placed in squash fields will pollinate the blossoms, squash bees provide a heavier harvest.
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
