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daninthedirt

butternut squash no-show dads

Well, this is funny. My butternut squash plants, which are growing like crazy, have their first flowers coming out. And they're ALL female! My experience of several years, and what I understand to be common wisdom about squash, is that exactly the opposite is expected. That is, over the last few years I get a few weeks of male flowers before the first female flower shows up.

What's going on? Isn't this unusual? I've got six female flowers on my two plants, and not a single male. I have a new plot of ground for these. Maybe I'm planting them on a estrogen superfund site??

Comments (13)

  • AiliDeSpain
    10 years ago

    That happened to me last year with my zucchini it's not common but it's normal :)

  • farmerdill
    10 years ago

    Concur. many of the newer high production varieties are especially prone to lead with females. Older varieties less so.

  • daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    That's very interesting. Thanks. I've never seen that before. I guess it makes sense that if you want higher production, you get the female flowers out in abundance asap, and hope that there's a male flower around somewhere. I had no idea that property could be bred into the plants.

    So much for the old conventional wisdom.

  • wally_1936
    10 years ago

    My butternut squash plant has a few small fruit showing now that the plant is well over 10 foot long. I am mostly letting it grow as I enjoy the leaves and the ground cover they give. But all in all I do hope to have it produce some nice squash for my wife. She loves it as a soup as well putting it into stews.

  • daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Wow. Now eight female flowers with healthy looking proto-squashes behind them. Not a single male flower. I'm thinking that a smart early season strategy might be to plant a slew of the new higher production variety and ONE regular one.

    I've got these under tulle, so I'm not going to luck out and get them fertilized by a male flower somewhere in the neighborhood.

  • glib
    10 years ago

    Next year plant a heirloom with the same timeline. That will give you the boys you need, so long as you don't plan to save seeds. But why keep these under tulle? They are moschata, and therefore SVB resistant. Anyway, under tulle means hand pollination, or no squash.

  • daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Thanks. Good idea.

    Why under tulle? Well, because in the past, when I've planted them, I've lost some vines to SVBs. Yes, butternuts are "resistant" to SVBs, but that resistance evidently isn't absolute. Had I planted Hubbards, they would have been demolished.

  • daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    P.S. Oh yes, having them under tulle, I'm resigned to hand pollination!

  • Christian
    10 years ago

    I am seeing the same thing. I actually am growing Hubbards and Acorns, and I am seeing female flowers on them even before the males, and have been puzzled by that. In fact, a few days ago I picked off 2 huge female flowers from one of my Hubbard plants (and ate them in a salad :) ) because there were no males to pollinate. Yesterday I got a male to open finally.
    I wonder if its the cold weather this spring? Dan, your also in TX, and we've had a lot of ups and downs. I wonder if the cold snaps have caused the plants to rush into production? In fact, tonight they are forecasting upper 30s... yikes. I hope my squash plants don't get affected too badly.

    Regarding them being bred to produce more, my experience throws that out the window.. I am growing hierloom varietiess... my Hubbard is the regular hierloom Blue Hubbard, and my acorn is Table Queen, also an hierloom variety.

    This post was edited by ccabal on Thu, May 2, 13 at 16:36

  • daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Thanks for reminding me about eating these useless squash blossoms. The one inch proto-squash on them would probably be pretty tasty.

    But yes, we've had an unusually cool spring, and maybe that's telling the plants something we don't want them to know.

  • daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa)
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    I've been led to understand that putting out male flowers first is advantageous to the plant. You get the bees attracted to that site before you expend the extra energy needed to produce the heavier female flowers.

    Also (and I'm not sure about this, as I saw just one post that said it), there are cultivars of squash that produce ONLY female flowers. In packages of those seeds, they include additional "male-only" seeds that are colored differently for identification. Really? For bulk production, I guess you want more of the former than the latter.

  • Christian
    10 years ago

    Dan,
    Well not just the proto-squash, actually the flower itself too. The whole thing is quite edible. I regularly pick the male squash blossoms and eat them in a variety of ways.

    The reason I am suspecting the cool weather is because last year, in the fall I planted some acorn squash, mostly as an experiment to see if they would be able to give me something before it got too cold, and after the SVB were gone. They started off real good, but unfortunately where I planted them ended up getting very little sun later in the fall, and when it got cooler. I noticed they started producing many female flowers while the plants were not very big. Maybe the cool weather tells them to hurry up and start producing fruit so it can reproduce.

  • christripp
    10 years ago

    I have all female blossoms on my bn too and it's sad, every blossom just drops off, not ONE squash on a most vigorous, and healthy vine. It's too late now, I'm sure, if even ONE flower manages to become pollenated. It's very disappointing. Last year I managed to harvest at least 4 per plant. Not amazing but better then zero:(

    oops, correction, I think the blossoms are all male, no bump under the flower.

    This post was edited by christripp on Fri, Aug 23, 13 at 8:29

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