No Zucchini? This Trick makes female flowers Grow!

Hi everyone. Today we're going to talk about zucchini, patty pan squash, yellow squash, all our summer variety squashes, and how we can trick it to begin fruiting more quickly. It's very frustrating when you have this big beautiful plant and it's just pooping out male flowers. It's not doing anything about creating a female flower and you have all of these male flowers. And even though that is part of the normal life cycle, the zucchini, if you have a shorter growing season, you don't want to be patient. You want to get this thing to start flowering and get some buds on there with the female fruit on it so that you can make sure it's pollinated so that you can get a really large zucchini or summer squash harvest. So let me show you what I'm talking about. So here you see I have this really large squash and if we look deeply into it, look at all of these flowers and every one of them is a male flower. And so how do I know that? Let's get one that you can really see. So see how it has a long skinny stem? There's no fruit, a little baby fruit underneath the flower or at the base showing that it is a female. So what are we going to do about it? We're going to get ruthless and we're going to cut half of these off. And that way it'll stimulate the plant to be able to produce more flowers. Because if we wait for the natural life cycle, it could be 10 days, 12 days before we start seeing any female flowers. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to snip away. And then there's even even these new ones here. Get rid of these new ones. These are the ones we want to get rid of because we want to... the mature ones are not going to help you. You want to get rid of all these baby ones. And so that's what I'm doing. I'm snipping away. He probably can't see me because of a giant leaf in the way. But see right here? He's got to go. And we're going to cut half of them out. Here's another one. We want to cut all of these out. Here's another one. And let me get him there. So that's what we're going to do. So let me show you what a female one looks like. Now here's a zucchini plant that actually has a female on it. And so this is what you want to have pollinated. And even though... see how small this plant is? And it already has females coming out. And then you saw that giant one over there that only had male flowers coming out. So it's spending all of its energy on growing leaves and creating male flowers. So by tricking it, by cutting off a lot of those new male flowers, the hope is that you're going to start seeing these come out so that they can be fertilized. So another thing that I want you to think about as well is that if you have a sole zucchini plant with a female flower on it but no male, and then you have another plant such as a summer squash or patty pan that has a male flower, use that to pollinate your zucchini. You can cross-pollinate. It won't impact this year's harvest. That's what would impact next year's harvest because then the seed would have that crossing over of the two different species of plants. So be ruthless. It's a trick. And we're tricking the plant. And I know it's hard. And every once in a while you might have a plant where it's pooping out a bunch of females with no males, which is very unusual. But if that happens, use the same technique. Cut half of them off. And I know that'll hurt you, but you can do it. So keep on farming, my friends.