Pollinating squash...
When I went out today I noticed that we had a bunch of little red tomatoes and one large red/green tomato but I'll talk about that later. Right now I want to talk about why our squash had been shriveling up and dying. It turns out that the squash produce male and female blossoms and they need to be pollinated male to female stigma. So I went online and read a bunch of articles on hand pollinating. Obviously the insects, bees and what not, have pollinate a few of the flowers properly but they don't get them all because they aren't look to go male to female they just go flower to flower. So you have to do some hand pollinating if you want to get the biggest harvest possible.
I went out and tried but did not really succeed because all of the flowers were closed. The squash blossoms are supposed to open in the morning and stay that way until early evening but they weren't. My guess is the infamous rain. The sky was so dark it did seem like early evening. I did get a feel for what I needed to do and I figured out what the difference between a male blossom and female blossom is...
Male Blossoms have a stigma that looks like a yellow Q-tip top. Female blossoms have what looks like a few round stigma attached to make one big round with a hollow center. It looks like a smaller, yellow, b.b. gun ammunition cap.
Instructions to Hand Pollinate:
1. Remove a male flower
2. Peel back the petals on the male flower to reveal the stigma
3. Rub stigma against (still attached) female stigma when open (should be easy to tell by stigma and fruit under)
4. One male flower for every 3 female flowers
5. After 3 cut another and continue
When I went out today I noticed that we had a bunch of little red tomatoes and one large red/green tomato but I'll talk about that later. Right now I want to talk about why our squash had been shriveling up and dying. It turns out that the squash produce male and female blossoms and they need to be pollinated male to female stigma. So I went online and read a bunch of articles on hand pollinating. Obviously the insects, bees and what not, have pollinate a few of the flowers properly but they don't get them all because they aren't look to go male to female they just go flower to flower. So you have to do some hand pollinating if you want to get the biggest harvest possible.
I went out and tried but did not really succeed because all of the flowers were closed. The squash blossoms are supposed to open in the morning and stay that way until early evening but they weren't. My guess is the infamous rain. The sky was so dark it did seem like early evening. I did get a feel for what I needed to do and I figured out what the difference between a male blossom and female blossom is...
Male Blossoms have a stigma that looks like a yellow Q-tip top. Female blossoms have what looks like a few round stigma attached to make one big round with a hollow center. It looks like a smaller, yellow, b.b. gun ammunition cap.
Instructions to Hand Pollinate:
1. Remove a male flower
2. Peel back the petals on the male flower to reveal the stigma
3. Rub stigma against (still attached) female stigma when open (should be easy to tell by stigma and fruit under)
4. One male flower for every 3 female flowers
5. After 3 cut another and continue
Tomato Time...
I picked the tomatoes and pulled off the suckers. Suckers are usually the small set of leave growing in between to larger branches. Pulling these off allows the plant to put more energy into ripening the tomatoes. As you can see these were not perfectly ripe but they were close enough and they tasted amazing. I never like slightly green tomatoes but these were totally different. I loved them. I wanted leave some for the others to taste and I did but I meant to leave more. I couldn't resist eating more and more.... MMMMMM!
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