There are some days I stop and realize what Amanda and I share on the phone may not be a typical conversation between two mom friends. It’s all good I promise but it’s just interests me where our topics lead some days. This morning’s Topic was: Male and Female Zucchini Flowers
This past week I was out in my garden after dropping my oldest off at school and noticed that my zucchini had blossomed! I was so excited! Then I quickly remembered that year after year I have issues with my squash not growing. I keep trying to grow a garden with my kids and then reality sets in and things just don’t grow.
Can you Tell from the images which is which?
That’s when I picked up the phone to have an interesting chat with Amanda…. oh to be in on this conversation, well actually I guess you will be because here’s what she shared with me.
There are female and male flowers with squash. Did you know that? I truthfully never thought about it before until she pointed it out for me. Once we started talking about it I did recall a few science classes in my youth but I guessed I had simple filed it away from lack of use. FYI…The male flower has a long slender stem with pollen and the female flower has a short stem along with a miniature squash at the base of the flower.
Become a Pollinator!
Here I was out with my youngest daughter teaching her about flowers and pollen and noticing the differences in the flowers. We took at with our paintbrushes or Qtips and touched the male pollen and then touched the female blossom, stigma. A little basic reproductive science at the plant level with kids.
So there you have it, there are male and female blossoms on zucchini plants and how to help your vegetables grow! I thought perhaps you might want to know too, just in case you don’t have a friend like Amanda to call and ask your gardening questions too.
Guess what we discovered a few days later?
A tiny zucchini that’s actually growing. If it had not been pollinated then it stops growing and just turns yellow then to mush. Hopefully we can attract more pollinators to our garden this year through planting the right flowers but until then we will be “Assistant Pollinators” . Here’s more information below about Pollination and how to attract Pollinators to your garden.
Resources for Kids about Bees and Pollination
- Pollination Science Lesson from Little Warriors
- Bee Unit from 2 Teaching Mommies
- Bee Crafts
- Honey Bee Bag Book from Delightful Learning
- Beehive and Bee Craft and Writing Prompt from Apples and ABC’s
- Kids Investigating Bees from Squiddo
- The Beehive Finger Song and Printables from Strings, Key and Melodies
- Creating a Pollinator Garden from Kids Gardening
- Attracting Pollinators to your Garden from Mother Earth Living
- How Can you Help Bee the Solution from Whole Foods Market Squash Pollination from Walter Reeves
- Hand Pollination of Squash from Garden Web
- Playing Matchmaker with Zucchini from Grow It! Eat It!
- How to Identify Male and Female Flowers from Complete Garden
Click here to Discover MORE GARDENING IDEAS WITH KIDS
We were just talking about pollination yesterday. Thank you for this wonderful post.
Thank you @JDaniel's Mom! We've been having a lot of fun discovering facts about pollination and seeing results of our efforts. Hopefully as the flowers grow we planted we'll see more pollinators in our yard.
I love that you got to pollinate the flowers, that's so cool!
Thank you so much for sharing this post on the Dig Into Gardening Link Up! I will be pinning it to my gardening Pinterest board.