Flowers and fruit - a short lesson

A flower/fruit garden question, one of TPP's favorite things.  The question was simple this person's cucumber plants had plenty of flowers, but was producing no fruit, no cucumbers.  This is definitely a problem that will probably get fixed shortly.  The reason this happens is that cucumbers have two kinds of flowers, the botanically naïve call the "male" and "female" but this is quite incorrect, although this understanding of things quite often prevails.  Superficially both flowers look a lot alike so that bees get fooled into visiting the rewardless female flowers.  Funny how many people don't notice this.  The botanical term for this is monoecious, technically one house (but two bedrooms is you want another understanding.)  So look closely at the flowers on your cucumbers.  The "female" flowers have little cucumbers just below the yellow perianth.  "Male" flowers don't.  Virtually all cucumbers start out male as these flowers are cheaper to make, but as the plant gets bigger, some female flowers appear, and if pollinated, begin developing into cucumbers, fruits that we eat at a juvenile stage.  The image borrowed from somewhere shows a male flower to the left and the female flower to the right.  The anthers and the stigma look a lot alike, so bees looking for pollen make mistakes, foraging errors that effect pollination.  Or you can do it yourself with a small brush.  Some varieties of cucumber only produce female flowers, so you must plant a pollinator plant  The seed packet will have some seeds dyed green so you can see the males, and if you don't do this (TPP made this mistake once.) you'll get lots of females but no fruit, unless you borrow some male flowers from a neighbors' garden.  If you don't understand why male & and female are wrong, here's link to a blog that explains what pollen really is.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Squash

This squash vine is clamoring through a hosta bed next to the patio. No one planted any squashes any where near here, but the tree rats must have missed one of the seeds provided as winter fodder. Hostas have nice leaves, but these are long done flowering, so each morning the new squash flowers are quite cheerful. They open with the dawn and by midday they are wilted. Squashes are monoecious (one-house) plants meaning that they have separate flowers for producing pollen and for producing fruit and seed. This is a pollen flower and the anthers are fused into a central column where the pollen is presented as a pollinator reward. Oh, wait, that's a floral visitor, a potenial pollinator, emerging with a considerable dusting of pollen having pretty well cleaned this flower out. The stigma of fruiting flowers is quite similar but offers no reward, a case of deception. The flowers, both kinds, are edible and can be used in cooking, usually in the bud stage. Best squash dish TPP ever had was a squash blossom souffle in Italy.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Begonia

Well, a Begonia isn't very exotic, so it always comes as a surprise that so many people don't notice what they are looking at.  Yes, flowers.  But Begonia is a monoecious plant.  Mono = one, ecious = house, so this means the plants usually, but not always, have both male and female (and yes, this is technically wrong) on the same plant (one house).  What tricks people is what tricks pollinators too.  The only obvious reward is pollen, and male flowers (center) have a cluster of yellow stamens that are pretty obvious against the light background of the perianth.  But only one of these flowers has stamens.  The others have a conspicuous yellow stigma presenting a very similar image.  If pollen is the only reward, then the non-rewarding female flowers cruelly deceive the pollinators by mimicking the rewarding male flowers.  This is called food-deception automimicry.  The flowers are different in another very obvious way that many people also fail to notice; the females flowers have a prominent winged ovary below the perianth, and a similar structure is completely lacking on the male flowers.  The ovary is sort of petalloid, and that may be the reason people don't notice.  Since the summer is here, apply this lesson to your cucumbers and squashes.