Quote:
Originally Posted by shotinthebacklund
There is a couple things that can be done. When the male flower opens use a qtip and harvest the male pollen, Carefully place that in a ziplock. It can be used later if careful to fertilize the newly opened female flower. Does not work all the time but I have been successful with it.
If sprouting your own seeds, Alternate the germination 1-1.5 weeks for half the seed batch.
Another pretty cool option is cross pollination. A pumpkin can be used to cross pollinate with zucchini and other squashes. In the first year (initial cross pollination) you likely wont see any variance in fruit production, but if you keep some seeds and grow again next year you could see some largely variable fruit. Fun experiment.
As in Calgary our season is short its very beneficial to hand pollinate and ensure you get the most growing time. I try to make sure I get my first female flowers pollinated using techniques above (mostly for pumpkin). As the season progresses you will have many female and male flowers open at the same time.
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I hand pollinated three zucchini's. My first one stayed really small, like a finger small for a few weeks. The next two are growing much larger so perhaps the first one didn't pollinate well enough. Here's hoping! Thanks for the advice.