Growing Zucchini
Zucchinis are great on the BBQ. Slice them in half, score them with a knife, add some salt, pepper, paprika and garlic and put them face down on the BBQ. They go great with chicken, steak and fish. At least that is the way I like to prepare and eat them. So when I started my aquaponics system, I definitely wanted to grow some zucchini.
About 2 months ago I started with organic zucchini seeds and put them into a seedling setup with soil. After about 10 days they started sprouting and some rather large leaves emerged, pushing through the soil that had initially covered them. I was able to successfully transplant four out of the six zucchini plants into my aquaponics system. The plants started growing noticeably, every day. All of a sudden one morning, they had developed four beautiful yellow flowers. I got all excited and was expecting to get some zucchinis soon. About a week later though, the flowers died and just fell off the stem with no zucchini in sight. This process repeated week after week. So I started researching this to see what was going on. It turns out that zucchini plants develop male and female flowers. When these are not pollinated, they just fall off. However, I also learned that the plants first produce all male flowers only and then later in the year add female flowers. All of the flowers that fell of the stem were indeed male flowers and weren’t able to develop into zucchini fruits anyway. Ever since then I was patiently waiting for the first female flower and voila – today I found one! I pulled out a little soft makeup brush and played bee. I gently pushed the brush into the male flowers and then into the female. I read that this increases the chances (and yield) of the plants to carry “to full term”. 🙂
I took some photos to show you how to identify and differentiate between female and male flowers. The male flowers have a very slim stem. The inside of the male flower only has one single anther (the middle portion of the flower that holds the pollen). The stem of the female flower looks like a baby zucchini fruit and is much thicker. The female flower has multiple anthers. Most other plants have hybrid flowers with male and female parts in one and the same flower.
So there you have it! I can’t believe I just wrote a story about flowers and bees!