2 Ways to Tell The Difference Between Female and Male Zucchini Flowers

hello everyone today I'm going to do a quick video about the difference between male and female flowers on squash this squash here is a zucchini it's really simple to tell the difference between the two and I'm gonna show you how to do it oh it's a bit windy today so it should be fun to film so at the moment this squash plant has two male flowers flowering this one here and this one here which is covered by this leaf earlier on this week I had two female flowers flowering and I hope that I have fertilized them correctly I did it by hand I'll show you that in another video I can't do it right now because I've only got two two male flowers of flowering and the female flowers are spent hopefully fertilized perfectly though but I'll show you in another time so this is a male flower here I find the flowers on this zucchini plant quite similar and so it's quite hard to distinguish between the two based purely on the flower if we go inside to the flower that's what we're going to find out if it's male or female if you can see that little yellow dot there that is the male sex organ and that is called a statement so the statement is made up of an filament which is the bottom part and the answer which is the top part and in the answer that's where the pollen is produced I'm going to go in a bit closer hopefully get you better so much so you can actually see the pollen grains on top of the answer there so ideally what happens is that pollinators fly into the male flowers looking for sustenance they become covered in the pollen then fly to a female flower they deposit the pollen on to the female sex organ which I'm going to show you in a second the flour becomes fertilized and then the fruit grows that doesn't always happen and so with squash plants we can actually fertilize the female flower ourselves as I said I'll show you have another time these are some of the closed male flowers so they're not opened yet Oh a Fed god-being of my life so that was the male flower there another way to determine between male and female flowers is the stem so we can see here that the male flowers have very long thin stems and they go all the way to the base there is no fruit on this stem if we look at the female stem you'll see that the fruit is attached to the base so let's go there now this is a female flower as you can see the petals are spent but let's go inside and look at the sex organs that sounds really creepy and pervy I'm sorry but it's necessary if we want nice yummy zucchinis so that there is the top of the female sex organ what we're looking at here is the stigma these little soft spongy bean looking type things is where the pollen lands and if the poem unsuccessfully owned this here the stigma then the flour becomes fertilized so that was the inside Athena flower never people further down to the base we see what looks like the beginning of the zucchini well sure you have the guys so that's my finger there so it's still quite small if the female flower isn't fertilized properly then this beginning fruit will turn brown and fall off so that's why fertilization is really important if I compare it here this is a male stem so remember it's nice and long one thing goes right down to the base this is the female part with the fruit so you can see that there was a vast difference between the two easy to distinguish this little thing sweet little thing here is the beginning of another female flower so that is the flower they're still in bud beginning as a fruit is much smaller so as I said this flower will need to be fertilized properly for this little thing to grow into a beast I can eat and that's basically it that's how you tell the difference between a male and female flower on a squash in this one particular a zucchini hope you enjoyed the video see you next time bye bye so that's why fertilization is really important lovely nice car say [Music] [Music]

Channel: Balconia Garden

Views: 39,353

Keywords: food, gardening, howto

Id: AyUIYudN3bE

Length: 5min 6sec (306 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020