Cucumbers, squash and zucchini plants can produce an abundance of fruit for you in a single season.

Often, there is so much produce that you are up to your eyeballs with fruit and end up sharing them with all your neighbours.  

Like with all gardening endeavors though, you may have a summer where the plants do not produce the fruit they have in past years.

This is something I have been asked about different times in the last couple of weeks.

Here are some reasons why your cucumbers, squash and zucchini might not be performing as desired.

Most squash are monoecious, meaning a single plant produces both male and female flowers. The female blossoms are the ones that produce the fruit. 

To tell whether the flowers on your plant are male or female, look at the area immediately behind the flower itself. Male blossoms are borne on a short, straight, green stem, while female blossoms sit atop a tiny bulbous growth (the eventual squash fruit).

If your squash plant produces ample flowers but never bears actual fruit, or it bears fruit that stops growing when it’s very small, then there’s likely a pollination issue. 

For fruit to form, the pollen from the male flowers must be carried to the female flowers by bees or other pollinators. Without the female flower being pollinated, no fruit will form. 

Usually, the bees are plentiful enough that they do a great job pollinating.

When your plants start producing flowers for the season, you’ll see the male blossoms first, and you’ll wonder where the female flowers are. Be patient — the female flowers will come.

If there have been unusually high amounts of rain or cold weather, this can delay the emergence of the female flowers by a bit. 

Cloudy and wet weather can also impact the activity of pollinators, which is another reason why you may not be seeing fruit yet. 

So, the decrease in the number of bees and unusual weather conditions can have an effect on how much fruit your plants can produce. 

Planting more than one plant will increase your chances of having male and female flowers at the same time.

If you see fruit that is shrivelling and/or rotting, this may also be a pollinator issue.

However, it can also happen because the conditions are so damp the fruit gets killed off by a fungus called blossom end rot.  

Make sure you plant your squash and cucumbers in a compost-rich soil with good drainage to cut down on disease issues.

So, making sure the female flowers are getting pollinated is the key to good fruit production.  How can you ensure this is happening? 

You can pollinate the flowers by hand — a fairly easy task to undertake.

Use a small artist’s paintbrush or a Q-tip to transfer some of the pollen from a male zucchini flower to a female flower. The pollen is located on the stamen, which is the part in the center of the male flower.

Dab the pollen on the tip of the stigma in the centre of the female flower.

You can also pull a male flower off the plant, remove the petals, and brush the stamen directly onto the stigma of a female flower.

With a little effort and dabbling in some science, you can have more produce than you know what to do with.

Joanne Young is a Niagara-on-the-Lake garden expert and coach. See her website at joanneyoung.ca.