Hello, It's my first time growing zucchini and I am interested in knowing if all the flowers are intended to have vegetables from them. There are flowers closer to the plant stalk which I can see are obviously going to have a veg and there are these tall stalks that shoot up a foot with a flower on the top which do not look like they can possibly support anything. Any answers?
No not all the flowers get fruit...only the ones that are closer to the plant...some are male and some female.
Gardenmama is completely correct. I can't add much to that, but I do have a foto: If you look carefully in tyhe center of the pic, you will see an un-opened bud on a skinny stem. That is a male flower bud and will produce no fruit. It is not the job of the make flowers to produce fruits--they act as a "pollen receptical", so to speak, for the bees to visit before visiting the "female flowers". The way that I tell which flower is which is as follows: The male flowers have a skinny stem at the base of the flower (as seen in the foto)...and a fruit-bearing female flower has a slight swelling visible at the base of the flower (on the most distal portion of the stem). Sorry that I do not have a foto handy of a female flower. I will make one tomorrow, if you would like for me to. I hope this helps.
I went out and made another foto showing the female flowers and the thickness of their stems in contrast to the more slender male flower stems.
I gave mine a good dose of fertilizer last weekend and they are doing much better...I found 3 new baby zucchinis tonight. I think that cutting back the leaves has also helped in this rainy season.
Always so imformitive Sjoerd and Gardenmama. I'm tucking this info away. I'm hoping to have some zucchini next summer.
