Growing Squash: How to Increase Your Squash Garden Yield

Why Pollinate By Hand?
Organic gardeners seldom have problems with pollination of squash, pumpkin, melons and other plants in the cucurbit family. The bright yellow blossoms attract many insects. However there are circumstances where you may want to hand-pollinate squash plants. Many areas have a reduced number of bees, and there may not be enough insects at the right time to assure good pollination of your crop. You may have neighbors who use chemical insecticides on their lawns or gardens, which will reduce the number of helpful insects in the area. Roadside or municipal chemical spray programs can also wreak havoc on the insect population, killing harmful and beneficial insects indiscriminately. Or if you want a pure strain for saving seeds, you can hand pollinate and be assured of the genetics of the fruit you will use for seed retrieval.

Cucurbits have imperfect flowers, meaning that some flowers have only male structures, and others have only female structures. The pollen from the male flowers must be carried to the female flowers for fruit and seeds to form.

("Perfect" flowers have both male and female structures, and they are often self-pollinating. They can also be pollinated by pollen from nearby same-species flowers.)

How to Identify Male and Female Blossoms
A squash vine will be dotted along its length with a number of blossoms. Bush type squash will have all the blossoms clustered closely together. Each blossom is either an "imperfect" male flower or an "imperfect" female flower.

Look inside the male flowers. You will see the anthers, the little knobs that hold the pollen. The filaments are the tiny stalks that support the anthers. Together, the anthers and filaments are called the stamen. That's it for the male flowers.

Look inside a female blossom. There is only the stigma, the sticky pad sitting on top of the style. The style is the tube that connects the stigma to the ovary, where the ovules are located. Pollinated ovules develop into seeds, and squash fruits develop around the seeds to protect them. The stigma, style and ovary are collectively called the pistil.

See Lesson Two for a guide for hand-pollination and information on keeping seed strains genetically pure.

Source:
Personal experience