Hand Pollinating the Squash

Early this morning, water stopped falling from the sky, making it possible for me to get a better look at what is going on out there. Low and behold, lots and lots of flowers! And several fledgling yellow squash just growing away.

The flowers open up and in the morning and only last for the day, so I decided to take the opportunity to hand pollinate a couple of them. I summoned up all my knowledge of plant science from middle school and referenced ehow.com before getting started. The male flowers were blooming on normal, green stems while the female ones were blossoming on top of the baby squash itself. In order for the tiny squash to develop it needs pollen from the anthers at the center of the male flower.

Normally, insect traffic alone is enough to pollinate the flowers, but lots of gardening sites recommend hand pollinating just to make sure all your viable vegetables get to grow up to their potential. So I just snapped of a male flower, held the petals back and brushed the pollen onto the center of the female flower.

It looks like a couple fruits have already set naturally. Time will tell if my effort to hand pollinate a couple flowers will produce better developed squash. I doubt it, really. None of the tiny yellow squash have shriveled or appear malformed as a result of a lack of sufficient pollination. I think I have a pretty healthy garden growing, despite the crowding issue.

I removed two tomato plants this morning to give the others some space. One was a tiny little thing that has just failed to grow as tall and strong as the others. The other was about a foot and a half tall and was simply too closely planted between two very strong tomato plants. I replanted the big one in Bed Number Two, but I'm not sure if it will make it because I wasn't able to recover much of its root system without disturbing the other plants' roots.