when a mommy flower loves a daddy flower...

I'm learning a lot in my garden this summer. For example, squash flowers are gender specific. The boy flowers have just a stalk and a flower:

But the girl flowers have a tiny immature squash looking thing just below the flower:

To end up with a baby squash, pollen from a boy flower must reach the girl flower. Then the immature squash will be able to develop into its own seed-bearing squash. One of the problems I have been having with my squash is that it seems to be producing only one flower at a time. Mostly boy flowers. So when I noticed yesterday that there were three flowers blooming at once and that one was a boy and two were girls, I was super excited. But the other garden-wide problem in our yard this year is that there is a serious dearth of bees to do the pollenating.

The bee shortage has also been affecting my tomatoes, who are producing heaps of flowers but no fruit. Many tomatoes are self-pollinting, but still require insects (bees) to either carry pollen around or to stamp their little feet on the flowers, vibrating enough to knock the pollen off and into the right spot. For the past few days I have been out with my paintbrush buzzing from flower to flower tapping on them and transferring pollen from tomato to tomato.

So rather than trust that one would bumble its way into our yard yesterday for the squash, I rolled up my sleeves to do the dirty work myself. I took my little paintbrush and carefully transferred pollen from the boy flower to each of the girls. I'm hopeful that my efforts will pay off, but a little annoyed that the bees are falling down on the job. I may have to start investigating plants that will lure them back into our yard.