How to self pollinate summer sqaush.

Where have all the bees gone? I've had the hardest time getting any squash to grow this year. From wilting yellow leaves, stunted growth and my flowers falling off instead of fruiting. I've been taking one problem at a time and figuring out why they aren't doing the well, and fixing the problem, and here is another one.

The other morning as I walked through my garden as I usually, do I found both a female and a male flower open and on the same plant. I thought I would try my luck at hand pollinating my squash.

Apparently these flowers are only open in the morning and close for the day with the heat, so the morning is going to be the best chance to get this done. What I did was take a cue tip and found the male flower. The male flower being the flower with a skinny stem. I placed the cue tip in around the center of the flower, where to my amazement was a lot of pollen. I then found the female flower, the flower with the bulky almost ball shaped stem and rubbed the inside of the flower with the pollinated cue tip.

In just a few days I could tell that it had worked, and now I have a little baby squash growing in my garden.


SIDE NOTE: How to self pollinate tomatoes? Luckily for tomatoes, you don't need to hand pollinate with a cue tip. Since tomatoes can be pollinated by the wind, I wait till the weather is cool, usually the evening or a cool morning, probably with out a lot of dew. Then I will slightly shake either the cage or the net it is growing on, basically to imitate the shaking of a bee. So far I have had a lot of success with this.