How To Pollinate Zucchini
Do you ever plant beautiful zucchini plants but the fruit never develops? It just shrivels up and dies? The reason for this is the fruit is not getting pollinated correctly. Sometimes we have to take over Mother Nature and get those fruit pollinated ourselves! Here’s why I’m taking the matter into my own hands and pollinating them myself:
My zucchini plants are huge! I have 3 plants that take up half of a 12 foot garden box! They have big leaves and are thriving! The problem? The leaves are so big that the few pollinators we have, don’t get into the flowers to pollinate.
Zucchini plants grow male and female flowers. The female flowers are attached to the actual zucchini that you eventually eat, and the male flowers grow on stems from the base of the plant. In a perfect world, bees and other pollinators would climb into both flowers and by default, pollen from the male flowers would stick onto the female flower, thus pollinating it. After it’s been pollinated, the fruit will grow and get large and if you don’t pick it after a few days….it’s giant and you have more zucchini than you know what to do with!
This year in my garden, we don’t have as many pollinators as we usually do and they aren’t getting to the zucchini flowers. The pollinator issue is something I’m going to work on next year (planting a pollinator garden close by and possibly start keeping bees!) But in the mean time, every morning I go out and pollinate the zucchini by hand. Here is how I do it:
Find a male flower. You can spot them because they are not attached to any fruit, they are just a stem with a flower attached. The stamen, the part that has the pollen on it, is a single stem inside the flower. Pick the flower and pull off the petals, leaving the stamen exposed.
Find the female flower. It will be attached to the zucchini. Gently rub the stamen of the male flower onto the stigma of the female flower (the center of the flower that kind of looks like a brain, haha!). The pollen will stick to the stigma and that’s all you have to do!
Repeat the process with all opened female flowers. I usually use one male flower to pollinate two female flowers.
That’s it! The process is so easy and pretty fun too! Don’t let your zucchini harvest pass by you! If you see both male and female flowers and yet you haven’t found any zucchini ready to harvest, pollinate them yourself and enjoy zucchini all season long!
