Look at these beauties! I still can’t believe I actually grew something. As you can see these are the eight ball zucchini, whose shape I am completely in love with. Such cute little balls. I started these from seed and had them under lights until they were ready to put outside. I read somewhere that you could use your compost pile to plant zucchini in since they are such heavy feeders, so I made big piles of compost where I wanted the plants and just put the starts in the center of the pile. It’s worked wonderfully and I will continue to do it this way.
I also learned that each zucchini plant produces both male and female flowers. When your little zucchinis rot and fall off the plant, it means they were never pollinated. I was hand pollinating my flowers and found out that I was doing it wrong, actually*. I was essentially too late to the party. You see that flower in the top right? How it’s all curled up? Once your flower is like that – it’s too late. Either your plant got pollinated or it didn’t. See the flower in the bottom right? How it looks like a tube? This is what you need. That is of course, if you are interested in hand pollinating.
The flower on the left is a male. Peel back the flowers and you can see the pollen covered stamen. The flower on the right is a female, you can tell by the the wee little zucchini at the base (not shown, of course). Peel back her flower and rub the pollen on the center pistil. Smoke a cigarette, perhaps take a shower.
It’s an oddly intimate act, and I felt a little funny when I first started doing it, like I was invading their privacy or something. The guilt is over and now all I can think about is eating their babies! And I’ve been so consumed with the copulating that I forgot about stuffing the flowers with cheese! Yum!
*My info came from Caitlin, an awesome person at the Olympia Seed Exchange.
