Female zucchini flowers won't fully open

I'm having problems with a black beauty zucchini. The male flowers open perfectly. The female blossom/fruit starts growing and at about an inch long, the green blossom starts looking a little distorted and ever so slightly open at the tip. The fruit grows about another inch and then turns yellow and dies. The blossom never changes color and doesn't open. This has happened with three females so far and seems to be occurring with another two.

My other black beauty is producing with the same soil, etc. Should I consider the plant damaged and replace it or is there something that I can do to try to fix it? I have been hand pollinating my squash but this one never gets to the point where i can pollinate with it. Oddly enough, the one time I tried to pollinate another zucchini using a male flower from this one, the pollination did not "take" so now I'm wondering if the male flowers of this plant are somehow warped, too.

How has your weather been? Is the plant that IS producing given extra shade? Does it get more water?

Does the one with the failures get blasted by sun all day? Does one have mulch but not the other?

The weather has been warm and now moving to hot - mid 90's. It has been raining once a week. I check moisture levels daily and it hasn't been too wet or dry. The beds get exactly the same amount of sunlight (which is a lot and they sit side by side). They have exactly the same soil (Ladybug which is recommended by Mel) and get the same treatment as far as liquid fish/seaweed/etc.

The plants look similar in size and coloring. One has produced mature fruit and the other zilch. The one that produces has a tightly furled female blossom on it right now and the one that doesn't produce has two slightly deformed female flowers. They are both transplants from one of our large nurseries here in Northern Texas (Calloways.) I'm new to SFG this year but have extensive experience growing flowers and herbs for thirty years. Is it possible to simply have a dud plant?

iiiigardener, please post photos of the problem plants. a full pic of the plant and a close up of the bloom in question. This would help in perhaps diagnosing the trouble... maybe.

I have a yellow crookneck that is doing the same thing...one the females flowers open and one doesn't but the male flowers open on both. The one that doesn't open had a squash borer in it, we got it out and buried the stem deeper to cover that area to see if we can save it. So far the plant still looks healthy but no change as of yet in getting the female flowers to open. The ones that are on there are growing but much more slowly than the other plant. I did tear open the flowers on the first two baby squash on that plant and pollinate them but there growth is very stunted and slow.

There is another post on here with the same issue, different squash and southerngardener said she had a plant do the same thing a few years ago and hers had a squash borer in it also. So, you may want to check your stems really good for any borer damage. Mine was hard to find...healthy plant with no signs til I checked the stems after seeing an adult moth around my plants and found a very small amount of frass on the stem right above the ground.

I did see an adult moth near the other plant (and was able to catch it and squash it to little pieces.) I've been treating all of the squash with BT and Neem and was going to add DE this evening. I had some wind damage to the plant (as well as the others) a few weeks ago and inspected at that time and found nothing. I had covered the vine (where it split from the wind) but will uncover it and check it out more thoroughly after the soil dries on the uncovered vine.

I happen to have another zucchini ready for transplant. If I can't find the borer, I may assume that it is still there and replace the plant. If I do that, should I treat the soil, not treat the soil, replace it or what before putting the new squash in?

OOOOOOOOOOH, ok, so this is the plant with that spilt vine, this could be the problem right there, just too much damage to support the plant. If you have a plant ready to go, pull the failing one and plant the new one. No need to treat the soil. But, do some reading about SVB.

I went ahead and replaced the plant (though my notes showed that the female fruit was failing to mature enough to even open before the vine split in the wind.) I did a thorough autopsy of the plant and could not find any trace of a borer. I saw that there is another thread (called Squash not producing) that has similar issues. I think the person involved is in California and doesn't have SVB in their area. I still wonder if it is possible to get a defective plant that won't reproduce as it is the female that fails to thrive while the male still flowers.

Before I yanked the plant, I used a male flower to pollinate a female on another plant so I'll see if it was successful.

I have another squash (yellow patty pan) that has a vine that is split even worse than the zucchini but it is thriving since i buried the vine in more compost and has fruit on it even as I write.

It might be helpful if someone could combine these two threads so others can get the full story in one place. My apologies for starting a second thread but when I did a search on zucchini specifically, the other thread did not come up for me.

iiiigardener: It was me who started the other post. Our problems sound similar, but not the same. My squash start having problems early on...they don't really even have much of a flower yet. They start small, shriveled and die off. There isn't even much of a flower to even try to open and pollinate..they're too tiny. I have another squash on the same plant that is beautiful...so I don't know what's up. The only thing I can think of is we put chicken manure compost around the plants to try and green them up since everything was starting to yellow pretty badly...so maybe we burnt them, and it affected the new growth?? No borers either....

Hi, southern gardener!

My female blossoms on the late zucchini was doing exactly the same as yours - getting barely there and then shriveling up. I never had a fruit on it but the male blossoms would open - maybe about five total in the last month. In that time, five females failed at about an inch long including a green blossom. What I noticed was that the female blossoms were not tightly furled - they looked like they were slightly open at the tip from the get go. They would appear and then slowly turn a weird yellow (fruit and blossom), stay about the same size and then shrivel. They didn't fall off, I had to remove them.

I'm hoping it was a bad plant or damaged from the wind but it is now history and I'm hoping that my new zucchini will thrive. To shore things up a bit, I think I may put in a two seeds near by as a further back up.

Okay, the female flower on a good plant that I pollinated using a male flower from the "dud" zucchini that I yanked has failed. The male flower seemed to have plenty of pollen on it and I put it in all the right places.  It never acted right after the pollination.  The flower started curling oddly and then the fruit started turning yellow.  I have other fruit on that zucchini, so I think that the "dud" plant was just that, a dud.  The male flowers would not pollinate and the female flowers would fail to open.  Maybe simply a case of survival of the fittest and that plan was simply not fit to reproduce.

My new zucchini is taking well to the spot and hopefully will start putting out fruit in the next couple of weeks.

This is great info and thanks everyone for posting your progress. I have 3 zukes that have been blossoming nothing but male flowers. Reading your posts and seeing others with similar problems gave me patience and hope. Finally this morning I saw a female blossom with a 1 inch baby zuke. It may have been pollinated as I've been seeing a bee here and there, but just in case I went ahead and helped her out with a fallen male flower from another zuke. The female was barely open, so I had to open the blossom a bit more to do the pollination. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Common zuke #1!!!!

About 2 weeks ago I started using fish fertilizer on all my plants. I have a lime tree (not in Mels Mix) that started taking off after watering it with the fertilizer. I'm concerned that my MM isn't quite right, so I want to give my plants a bit of a boost. 2 of my zuke plants are struggling a bit. The 3rd on is doing well and is the one that produced the baby zuke.

In the end, the good plant seemed to go bad after I tried pollinating it from the "dud" one. The new green leaves came in weird - they looked kind of like oak leaves - very unlike the existing leaves it had. I tried to pollinate a couple more females and they all died. I decided to pull that plant, too, and direct sow some seeds into its place. Those seeds are sprouting their first true leaves at this point.

It makes me wonder if it was some sort of virus. I inspected the stem thoroughly just in case it was SVB but couldn't find a trace. This particular plant had not suffered any wind damage and the only "new" thing I did to it was try to pollinate it from the bad plant. It was so weird looking with the odd leaves that I couldn't see trying too hard to keep it going.

This is my first year growing summer squash and I thought that with three plants, I would have more than enough. I've only had two zucchinis and two patty pans so far and will have to hope that my new plants will mature and provide squash for the rest of the summer.

As of now my my one baby zuc is turning yellow. Oh, oh! The same plant is growing another new zuc with a flower. Hope this one does better! I'm starting to think I may need to water more. I have a worm compost bin and am learning how much water it needs (lot but not excessive). Josh has a worm tube in his bed. If I put a worm tub in my bed, I don't think my worms will survive due to the soil not being moist enough. Maybe this is the cause of my plants not growing as fast as expected....hummm....

iiiigardener wrote:In the end, the good plant seemed to go bad after I tried pollinating it from the "dud" one.  The new green leaves came in weird - they looked kind of like oak leaves - very unlike the existing leaves it had.  I tried to pollinate a couple more females and they all died.  I decided to pull that plant, too, and direct sow some seeds into its place.  Those seeds are sprouting their first true leaves at this point.

It makes me wonder if it was some sort of virus.  I inspected the stem thoroughly just in case it was SVB but couldn't find a trace.  This particular plant had not suffered any wind damage and the only "new" thing I did to it was try to pollinate it from the bad plant.  It was so weird looking with the odd leaves that I couldn't see trying too hard to keep it going.

This is my first year growing summer squash and I thought that with three plants, I would have more than enough.  I've only had two zucchinis and two patty pans so far and will have to hope that my new plants will mature and provide squash for the rest of the summer.  

You have done so well keeping notes and playing detective! It sure does look to me like it was a "dud" plant! I like your attitude to just pull the bad plant(s) and get on with new. You have a long growing season which helps a lot!

Both my zucchini and yellow squash seem to produce male and female flowers at different times. Passing ships in the dark. The females don't want to open all the way, or in time before the male shrivels up. I have taken to snipping open the end of the female blossom and pollinating with any male squash flower I can snip re-open. Not saving the seeds so cross-pollinating is not a concern. Awful lot of work just to get a couple squashes! I don't know if the heat wave (100+ degrees) has anything to do with the problem.

Boy those bees sure make it seem so much easier to pollinate our zucchini, if only we knew if they visited or not. They should leave a calling card that says: "I've been here, you don't need to worry"! I am hoping I don't need to worry about pollinating. My neighbor behind has been picking his zucchini (and gave me one) so I may just let nature take its course for right now with mine.

Hi iiiigardener - I'm just touching base to check on the progress of your Zukes and to see if there is anything we can do to help. I had 2 bad Zukes, got about 2 inches long, turned yellow and died. I even helped the second Zuke polinate, but it didn't work. I got lucky on the 3rd. I've been noticing more bees hanging around, so I guess they took care of their business.

I am having the same problem; leaves yellowing as well. Not sure if it is weather, bad plants, or to small of a pot. I just keep trying to help things along.

How old are your zuke plants? It took a few flowers of both male and female to blossom and die, then I got a couple of zukes that also turned yellow and died before I started to get a couple of zukes that were healthy. I only have 1 zucchini on each of two plants so far. I just harvested my first zuke yesterday. The 3rd plant is a runt but seems to be starting to show decent growth and more flower. I wonder if zukes have to get to a healthy maturity stage to start producing.

As I'm sure you know, having the right compost mix helps. I started using worm tea and fish fertilizer because I think the structure of my compost was weak. A couple of weeks after I strengthened my compost my plants really took off. I'm also removing yellowing leaves from the bottom of my plants so more nutrients go to the healthier leaves and flowers.

My garden is now at the point where most of my plants are getting flowers (watermelon, tomatoes, cilantro, basil, etc.). The blossoming flowers seem to be attracting more bees, which I didn't see before.

I hope there is something here that can help.

Hi there, I hope someone can help me out a little. I tried planting Zucchini recently. At start they seem to grow fine. Male Flowers seems to be blooming and all but it is the female flowers that got me really puzzled, they don't seem to grow and bloom and they just stay small... 

The climate over in Kuching is Tropical rainforest, so it is hot and sometimes can get humid at times. Now it is the monsoon season so it rains a lot... and rains like everyday now.

Any idea what's the problem?  

It is typical of the zucchini squash plant to put out many male flowers before putting out viable female flowers and fruits. In the photo, it looks like it will open in a day or two. Give it another few weeks for good results.

and Welcome to the SFG Forum!

camprn wrote:It is typical of the zucchini squash plant to put out many male flowers before putting out viable female flowers and fruits.  In the photo, it looks like it will open in a day or two. Give it another few weeks for good results.

and Welcome to the SFG Forum!

+1  Patience

And Welcome to the Forum!

Thank you! I am so glad I have found this forum. Here are the lastest photo of the zuke that I was talking about. It is starting to shrivel   and the flower never seem to bloom. 

I have a question though, I planted 2 zukes in one container... could it be overcrowding that is stressing the plant? I added some more sheep manure to try and boost it. I have also attached photos of it. 

I am actually new to this and quite a newbie when it comes to gardening. All of your comments and guidance are very very much appreciated.

edwinlgk,  Those are nice clear photos of your concern.  Sometimes the first flowers/fruit are "practice runs" for the  plant.  Do you have bees or other flying pollinators, or will you have to manually pollinate the flowers?

Two plants per square is a little crowded unless they are both falling in opposite directions.  I grow vertically with 1 per corner square.  The leaves can get quite large.  But, my humble advice, consider this year the year of experimenting and learning.  I have learned so much since starting my SFG beds in early March.