I need yellow squash advice

My plants are beautiful and have lots of blooms but when the squash gets about 2 inches long it starts to shrivel up to turn brown. Any suggestions?

Squash plants may produce female flowers before there are male flowers to polinate them. When this occurs they will produce a small fruit that will rot and fall off. They will also drop new fruit when there is already an abundance of fruit on the plant. Give it a bit more time to set fruit before you worry....it is not a disease. This is one of my squash plants today....

Thanks manitoak123!! Your squash looks great!

If this keeps happening, you can hand pollinate. Just take a male flower, strip off the petals and dab the pistil it on the female pistil. (I think I'm blushing describing this )

How do you tell the male and female squash flowers apart again? Hopefully this is a family-safe subject.

i personally have no clue how to tell the difference, BUT!

last year i had amazing crop of FOUR canteloupe from one pollination session on a single plant - all i did was take a qtip and when i saw flowers one day swabbed the inside of every flower a couple times - going back and forth til i know i got them all at least 2x - figured the pollen would be appropriately blended then..

worked great! wish i had done it the next time i saw a bunch of flowers but i got distracted with kids and 'stuff'. ..

this year, i'm gonna do better and see if i can double the harvest per plant!

i also put a child's 'artist paintbrush' in my gardening 'gear' so when i see flowers, i can be mroe delicate about pollination. qtip is pretty big.

hth.

bettyann

I went out this morning to pollinate my squash and was surpriseed that only one of the blooms was female. I have had so much fun with my first garden and everyday I learn something new. I just assumed that if there was fruit forming that it was not a pollination problem!!!! Now I am going to try it with my cucumbers

@Megan wrote:How do you tell the male and female squash flowers apart again? Hopefully this is a family-safe subject.

The female flowers have a bulb behind them which is the baby squash, and the pistils are small bulbs in the center of the plant. The male blossom is on a stem and the pistil is, well, "male like". ( Hope that passes the family-safe requirement.)

I use a small paintbrush for cukes as I sometimes have to be a contortionist to see which are males or females. It's just easier to touch a paintbrush to each blossom.