Hello,

I'm growing zucchini in my garden and only have 1 plant. I can see really beautiful flowers, but no zucchini so far.
Do I need at least 2 plants to be able to grow zucchini ?

Thanks for your help,
Amelia

Sounds like you may have an all-male flowered zuke on your hands.
Some varieties (most of them) both male and female flowers are produced on the same plant. Males supply the pollen, females the fruit. It is easy to tell a squash flower's sex.
A female flower will have a miniature fruit behind the flower. For some this means a small cucumber-shaped fruit, or a rounded ball for others. Male flowers have no such immature fruit, only a straight thin stem to the main vine.
Some varieties will have only one kind of flower on each plant. Still others can be stressed into bearing only male flowers.
Since it is early in the season, and you obviously have had more than one or two flowers show up, you'd better get two or three more plants growing. You have an all-male flower bearer.
Once you see what kind of flowers the other plants create, you can cull the all-male flowered plant if you need the space.

Hi Loamlump,

Thanks for the explanation. I may actually hae some female flowers, as I indeed noticed some flowers with a small fruit behind them. I guess I just have to wait now and see what will happen.

Amelia

If you have spotted female flowers and they dropped off before developing their fruit, it is usually cold weather that is the culprit.
When conditions are warmer, the flowers should stay and fruit will begin to multiply!

If you have both sexes and are not getting fruit it is because they are not getting pollinated and you may have to hand pollinate. Take a male flower and peel off the flower petals and then waggle the stamens in the female flower making sure to touch the pistals so pollen is transfered. Or you can get a camels hair artists paint brush and pick up the pollen form the male flower, off the stamens, and transfer it to the pistals in the female flower.

The method I heard for stressing vining fruit into producing more female than male flowers is to pinch out the tip of the main vine after it gets to 10' or so. It'll then (supposedly) produce side branches which will have more female flowers than male.

Never tried it myself--sounds like another experiment for this year.

This is one of the many ways Nature deals with a suspicion of impending doom, by pouring out more fruit (seeds) to survive for another generation. Tomatoes, for example, tend to get extremely seedy in a drought. Flowers race to produce seed before the frost.

The examples are endless, and it's fun to find them. You just have to look past our hybrid, seedless curtains.