What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today I am taking a question from Q mysterious name, but a great question. He or she says

Zucchini's only flower and produce no fruit.

What is going wrong?

Now, many people who grow zucchini's

for the first time are confused and wonder what they did wrong.

They see the flowers and they think that those will develop into beautiful,

delicious zucinies, but they don't. So they wonder, hey, what am I doing wrong? Well, many

zucchini plants produce male and female blossoms. The male blossoms appear first to attract bees, so your zucchini plants might produce blooms for a week or more that don't set fruit.

The male blooms have the pollen necessary to pollinate the female blooms, but they don't produce fruit on their own.

So male blooms, again, those will appear before females and they typically will appear on a long and slender stem.

The female blooms appear after the male blooms and they have a swollen ovary at the

base of the bloom. It looks kind of like a miniature zucchini.

So if you look at that, you'll be able to tell. So the reason why a zucchini wouldn't

produce fruit is because the male blooms are not pollinating the female blooms.

So in the natural world outside of gardening where zucchini's grow in the wild, bees visit the male bloom, and then the pollen sticks to their bodies,

then they visit the female bloom, and then inside of that blossom, there is a sticky substance that pulls the pollen off of the bees.

Then that pollen is deposited into the bloom, that fruit swells and begins to grow.

That is the pollination process that we're looking for.

So the simple answer here to answer Q's question is to say that your zucchini plant is not getting

pollinated.

So you need either to increase the amount of bees

in your environment, so you get some natural pollination

...