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.
They look fantasic – well done! We are growing zucchini too (though here in the UK, they are called courgettes), because we have a delicious pasta recipe that uses the yellow ones, and we can hardly ever find them for sale. So far there are three teeny tiny yellow courgettes growing – I hope we’ll get to eat them before the slugs do…
Hi Laura! The slugs have been so incredibly horrible for us this year because it’s been so cold and damp, so I feel your pain. I’ll send good courgette vibes over to you…