Summer squash is a favorite for home vegetable gardens.  In addition to being fairly easy to grow, summer squash tends to be very prolific, offering a bountiful return at harvest for a small investment of space.  However, inevitably this time of year I take numerous calls about squash plants that bloom but don’t produce fruit.  With squash plants we’ve come to expect fruit relatively soon after the appearance of flowers.  Well, you know the saying, “where there’s smoke there’s fire.”  Not always true.  Nor is it true that where there are flowers, there’s fruit.  Sometimes there’s only smoke, at least until there’s sufficient fuel and oxygen for combustion to occur resulting in a flame.  An analogous catalyst is required for squash flowers to produce fruit.  The catalyst?  Adequate pollination.   

Squash plants produce both female and male flowers on the same plant.  So for adequate pollination to occur both flowers types must be present simultaneously in order for insect pollinators, such as bees, to do their work.  Squash flowers open early in the morning and close around noon of the same day and if pollen from a male flower is unavailable or if local pollinizers (bees) are not present then fruit set on the female flower will not occur.  This often results in tiny squash fruits, which are actually swollen ovaries, falling off the plant with the spent, unfertilized female flower. 

If you just can’t wait, then one option is to collect some pollen from male flowers and do the pollination by hand. Otherwise, you can be patient and let nature do the work.  This is my preferred approach, as normally it’s just short time before there’s more squash than you can give away to the neighbors anyway.  Furthermore, there’s likely a good reason for the natural happenings in the garden.  Consider the plants needs.  Making fruit is an energy expensive process and early in the season squash plants are growing vegetatively at rapid rates in order to be physiologically prepared for heavy bearing of fruit throughout summer.  So, my recommendation is to be patient and let the bees take care of business.  The squash will come.