Squash not producing

[Brown Thumbs]

We've gardened for years and moved a couple of years ago. Our new place has a limited garden area due to shade and lots of oak trees. I chose a spot that gets approximately 5-6 hours of sun per day (11am-4pm basically). We tried growing yellow squash and tomatoes last year and it didn't make hardly anything. This year I added some lime during the winter (typcially acidic soil in our region), plus mulched leaves and added a little top soil around each plant thinking it's poor soil conditions. Our squash plants look fine, but they aren't making once again. Little squash don't seem to be getting polinated and simply shrivle up. I've never had this problem and usually four plants make all the squash we can eat. Any tips on what we may can do to make them produce or is the lack of full sun probably to blame?

BTW...new to the forum and thanks for any advice.

[rainbowgardener]

No, I don't think it is the sun issue if they are getting 5-6 hrs of direct sun. And you mention the "little squash" so it must be flowering. I think if the sun were the problem, they just wouldn't flower.

Does sound like a pollination issue. Female squash blossoms come with a little squash embryo behind them. If the flower is not pollinated, the embryo will still grow for a little while, then shrivels up and dies as you describe.

So, to start with, are your plants producing both male and female flowers? Check for flowers that do not have the baby squash behind them. If so, do you see bees around the flowers?

If you have male and female flowers, it is easy to hand pollinate them.
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=217045#217045

For the future, plant more things in your garden that attract bees and other pollinators. That includes growing herbs like sage, oregano, basil, thyme and letting some of them flower. Also anise hyssop, borage, penstemon, purple coneflower, and others.

[Brown Thumbs]

No, I don't think it is the sun issue if they are getting 5-6 hrs of direct sun. And you mention the "little squash" so it must be flowering. I think if the sun were the problem, they just wouldn't flower.

Does sound like a pollination issue. Female squash blossoms come with a little squash embryo behind them. If the flower is not pollinated, the embryo will still grow for a little while, then shrivels up and dies as you describe.

So, to start with, are your plants producing both male and female flowers? Check for flowers that do not have the baby squash behind them. If so, do you see bees around the flowers?

If you have male and female flowers, it is easy to hand pollinate them.
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=217045#217045

For the future, plant more things in your garden that attract bees and other pollinators. That includes growing herbs like sage, oregano, basil, thyme and letting some of them flower. Also anise hyssop, borage, penstemon, purple coneflower, and others.

Thanks for the link. I'll give that a try during the early mornings before work and see if it'll help us. I read that you can use a small painter's brush when hand polinating (googled that). My squash look pretty much like the picture in the thread you sent. There are male and female on them.

Is there anything that I can plant now that may attract bees to help me out, such as a couple small flowers that I can place in the outer edges of the garden? Our house is approximately 75 yards from the garden location and we have lantanas, daylilies, gardinas, merigolds, etc. blooming. The only time I ever see many "bees" is when our holly bush blooms. We live out in the country and you'd think polinators would be plentiful.

I'm hoping the other plants will do better this year. We planted some peppers, squash, tomatoes, zucchini, and an egg plant. Thanks again for the help.

[rainbowgardener]

Most of the flowers in your flower garden are not particularly bee attracting. But even the ones that are like marigold, if 75' away, you are tending to attract the bees away from your garden, not to it.

Plant some of the flowering herbs I mentioned, or nicotiana, next to or in your garden. At this point for instant results, you could just buy a couple of basil/ sage plants from a nursery, stick them in and let them flower.

[Brown Thumbs]

Thanks Rainbowgardener. I went out this morning and found three female flowers open. None of the male flowers had opened yet though at 8am. I opened one up and followed the instructions of the link you gave me, so hopefully we'll have three squash developing soon.

I didn't wait for your reply yesterday before heading to the store. I bought a six pack of yellow marigolds and placed in the garden. See picture below. Maybe that'll help with attracting bees. It is dry here as you can see in the picture, but I water the plants at least every two days and the perk back up at night just fine. Nothing looks all that good though as you can tell with my tomatoe plants.

[mtgarden gal]

This is what I use to attract the pollinators. Works like a charm for me. I planted them last year as a boarder along one side of my garden. I sowed another packet this spring, but also realized that many of last years flowers had reseeded themselves this spring.

https://gurneys.com/gurneys%253Csup%253E%253C-sup%253E-beneficial-bug-blend-/p/80670/

[rainbowgardener]

Can I make a more general suggestion? What your garden needs now is mulch, lots and lots of mulch. It is looking dry, despite all that watering. Laying down a bunch of mulch will suppress weeds and conserve moisture, so things will do better with less watering.

Mulch could be grass clippings if you have a whole bunch, shredded paper, a bale of straw spread around, fall leaves if you have any bags from last year still around, pulled weeds, pinestraw, whatever organic you can come up with.

But it's never good to leave all that bare dirt... cause of the Dust Bowl you know. Losing topsoil all the time as well as evaporating off water and increasing the salts in the soil.

[Brown Thumbs]

Ok I will gather some mulch. I have always been cautious about adding hay and grass clippings around tomatoes because I thought it would encourage southern blight, and introduce weed seeds to the garden. I have access to hay and pine straw that I can add around my plants as you've suggested.

BTW - There was a bee in my squash flowers this morning! Maybe the addition of marigolds helped. However, I'm only seeing female flowers open. The male flowers are there, but not opened up at the same time as the female...does that make sense? I checked about 7am, so maybe they open a little later in the day when I'm not home.

Thanks again for your help. I noticed your reply on a couple other questions I posted in other threads. I'm sure we'll have more questions.

[rainbowgardener]

It's early in the season, give them time and they will work it out.

Southern blight is one I'm not familiar with. I looked it up and found this:

The pathogen is spread about by movement of sclerotia via splashing water or by transport of infested soil or plant materials. The disease tends to be a problem in soils with high levels of available carbon, from sources such as fresh mulch that has not been well composted, or dead or dying plants (weeds, grass, etc.). It often colonizes these materials before attacking live plants. However, the pathogen can spread more easily to neighboring plants when the soil is not mulched.
https://www.clemson.edu/public/regulatory/plant_industry/plant_prob_clinic/southern_blight_hosta.html

re "available carbon, from sources such as fresh mulch that has not been well composted" since it is talking about carbon, I take it that would apply to woodier mulches, wood chips or the shredded paper I mentioned, but not particularly to grass clippings.

It mentions splashing from the soil and having your soil mulched helps prevent that.

I did see that amending your soil with high nitrogen amendments helps prevent southern blight

Amending soils with organic fertilizers, biological control agents, and organic amendments—such as compost, oat, corn straw, and cotton gin trash—may help control southern blight. For example, the use of organic amendments, cotton gin trash, and swine manure was found to control southern blight through the improved colonization of soil by antagonistic Trichoderma spp. (Bulluck and Ristaino 2002). Deep plowing the soil combined with applications of certain inorganic fertilizers—like calcium nitrate, urea, or ammonium bicarbonate—was also shown to control southern blight on processing carrots (Punja 1986). Studies have proposed that the increased nitrogen inhibits sclerotia germination, whereas the increased calcium might alter host susceptibility.
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pp272

Grass clippings are high nitrogen. Coffee grounds, tea leaves, peanut shells, spoiled hay are other possibilities for high nitrogen mulches. The hay can introduce weed seeds.

So it sounds like even if you are in an area where southern blight is a problem mulching with anything "green" I.e. high in nitrogen, low in carbon, is still a net plus in preventing it, as well as the other benefits I mentioned for your soil.

If you cut your grass before it goes to seed, you will never be adding seeds to your garden with grass clippings.

[Brown Thumbs]

Yes, I can rake up some grass clippings and use that. I did put some hay around the tomatoes so far. I had part of a bale in my dog's house from the winter, which he doesn't need now that it's 90+ degrees here already.

I've had the southern blight issue years ago when I lived in a different part of the state (Mississippi). It starts only when the temperature gets up in early summer and keeping the soil damp makes it worse. The plants will simply wilt and die, when you pull them up the roots have this spider web looking stuff (fungus I assume) on them. I've always here it's why they say don't plant your tomatoes on the same row each year.

[rainbowgardener]

The idea of not planting your tomatoes in the same spot is for disease prevention, but it can be any of a variety of soil borne diseases - late blight, early blight, septoria, etc.

[JPHowell]

I had the same similiar issue this year and I accredited mine to the blooms being stunted. In north GA we are having crazy night temperatures in the early spring 80 day to 45 night. Once it stabilized at a decent night time temperature I started noticing my squash getting bigger.

[rainbowgardener]

Temperature issues might slow them down, but I don't think it would cause them to shrivel up like that, unless it were actually a hard frost, which I doubt this time of year.

[JPHowell]

Temperature issues might slow them down, but I don't think it would cause them to shrivel up like that, unless it were actually a hard frost, which I doubt this time of year.

mine was a month ago or so not recently.