All my veggies have bloomed but no fruit cantaloupe,watermelon, squash etc. any answers?
Question:
Answers:
It takes a while for the plants to start to grow their fruit. My Tomatoes have had flowers for a week or more now and they are JUST starting to form small fruit. Have patience and they should start to grow soon.
Sometimes they take a while. They need to be pollinated by bees and other insects.
PS- sometimes I try to pollinate myself by removing a blossom and tapping them on other blossoms. I don't know if it works, but I've done it...why not try.
its to early yet patients grasshooper
Poor pollination affects fruit set. Also too much nitrogen can be a factor which will delay the setting of fruit on the vine. A mid summer heat wave can cause plant stress. The tiny pollinated fruit may abort as a result. A heat wave can also deter bees from their job, making hand pollination more important.
Male and female flowers are found on the same squash plant. The male flowers will appear well before the female flowers and also in far greater numbers. In periods of hot weather the male flowers are more numerous. When they get a cool spell, the female population will catch up.
Male flowers are short lived. They will open up before dawn and will close completely by mid-morning.The male flowers possess both pollen and nectar, the female flowers only nectar. If the plants are watered from overhead early in the day, that may prevent all further pollination for that day. Everything gets washed off of the short-lived male flowers. Replacement flowers do not open then until the following morning.
So don't water in the morning if you want to give your plants optimum opportunity to pollinate. Having a lot of rain early in the day doesn't help pollination either, & bees are not active when it rains.
You can pollinate by hand. Take the male flower and gently rub its pollen onto the stigma sections in the center of the female flower. Pollination will be more successful if several male flowers are used to pollinate one female flower.
I had the same question and I came across an article that mentioned the following:
"If this is the first flush of flowers on your zucchini plants, don't worry. What you're seeing is normal. Zucchini plants, like all members of the Cucurbitaceae family of vine crops (melons, cucumbers, squash, etc.) produce male and female flowers on the same plant. During the initial first flush of flower production, usually only one gender of flower (usually the male flowers are first) is produced for the first few weeks. These flowers naturally shed their pollen and drop off. After this initial flush of flowers, a second wave of flowers develops that will contain both male and female blooms. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but some scientists think it's nature's way of "luring" in the bees-sort of giving them time to catch up and discover the flowers. Successful pollination requires proper timing and this first flush of "bait" flowers may be the plant's way of making sure there are bees at the ready when both genders of flower emerge. If the female flowers on your plants (the flowers with the slight swelling below the back of their petals) continue to drop off once both types of flowers are being produced, it's an indicator of pollination problems (the female flowers will abort if not pollinated). Then you may need to consider hand pollinating your plants."
The long and the short of it is that the first sets of flowers are often all male. Within a week or so the next sets will have both sexes represented.
More Related Questions & Answers...