Thanks, everyone for your responses. I've grown other veggies quite successfully, but this is my first year with summer squash. I'll just sit back and wait for the fruits to come along. In the mean time I'll enjoy the male blooms. By the way a great stuffing for squash blossoms is to simply process raw shrimp, peeled and deveined, in a food processor, season as you like, (salt, pepper, and some Old Bay Seafood seasoning is great) and some liquid (water, shrimp or chicken stock, or a bit of white wine) to maintain moistness in the final stuffing.

>I've actually found Euphorbias to be a loooooot easier than cacti. For me, some (globulars/medusoids) are easy, but others (mostly the shrubby ones) are hard. The problem I have with the shrubby species is keeping them over the winter. I grow increasingly convinced that they need a lot of water, at least once every two weeks. amccour, not sure about E. nyassae vs. E. godana. The editors of the Euphorbia Journal say that they've never seen E. nyassae in cultivation. In any case, it should be easy to tell apart from E. godana: This is E. nyassae in habitat (from The Euphorbia Journal): Norma, thanks for your kind comment. Another way of looking at the Euphorbias is that they're either monoecious (from the Greek "one house"...meaning a single plant will produce cyathia with both male and female flowers) or dioecious ("two houses"...a single plant will produce either male or female flowers). One more factoid :) The shrubby species are all monoecious, and don't hybridize. The globular species (for example, E. obesa) are all dioecious, and are tramps, hybridizing with anything they can find. :) -R

Well, then, Larry, if you have a lot of bees, I don't know why your female flowers aren't getting pollinated. You still could hand pollinate by using a Q-tip, a small paint brush, etc. to transfer pollen from the male flower to the female flower if you want to ensure that fertilization occurs. Or, just remove a male flower and 'dab' the female flower with it to transfer the pollen. We have had oodles of bees in the garden, but they seem like they've been really distracted by all the flowers on the cucumbers and Armenian cukes, but have not been so entranced by the flowers on the watermelons and winter squash. It makes me think the bees play favorites perhaps. I've seen more winter squash set fruit in the last week than in the entire previous two months so maybe it is just that the timing is finally right for whatever reason, and it wasn't before. Our rainfall has been more like yours, Larry, in that it hasn't fallen that much....a little over an inch last week and then again today. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't much compare to parts of OK who keep getting 2 or 3 or 4" every week or two. Our rainfall now is slightly above our usual year-to-date rainfall for this point in the calendar year, but not significantly so. The heavy rainfall since mid-May has gone a long way toward making up for the lack of rain prior to mid-May, but the part of our county that we live in still remains in moderate drought. I'm not having to water all that much though, at least not the last 2 weeks, and the plants look really great for late-July. I like the rain, but am relieved (in an odd way) that we are only getting smaller amounts here. We don't need the flooding and we don't need for anything to send the snakes up out of the woods into the garden....and we don't need for excess rain to ruin what has been a great summer so far. Too much rain right now could simply ruin the texture and flavor of all the watermelons and muskmelons that are nearly ripe, so I'd just as soon have the rain stay a little on the skimpy side. I was thinking about your Brazilian squash. Often, squash (and beans and maybe some other things as well) from that part of the world are day-length sensitive and won't set fruit until late in the summer or even early autumn as the number of hours of sunlight per day decreases. George could tell you more about that than I could, because he has lived and gardened outside the USA whereas I've always lived and gardened within 100 miles of where I live now. I grow a scarlet runner bean, mostly just to have the gorgeous red flowers for the hummingbirds, that is called Insuk's Wang Kong, and it never flowers until a couple of months after the regular scarlet runner beans have begun flowering. It sometimes doesn't even set beans and mature them for me, because it is just so late that an early first frost gets the beans before they mature. For that reason, I grow it more as a novelty or curiosity and never really expect a harvest from it. I'm sure in some climates it sets great, but ours isn't warm enough deep enough into fall for it to be a big producer here. You may find that your Brazilian squash is a really late producer in the same way. Dawn

Will give an update on my squash...Yellow squash started producing more fruit, getting 3 or 4 a week now, Zukes are another story, still only getting one per week. Last week brought heavy rains here in denver for two days. Many of my plants, Sunflowers, some peppers, and potato plants did not fair well and as a result are struggling to remain upright (darn squirls now have an easy time of it reaching the sunflowers, time to get the pellet gun out. The plant that was damaged the most from the rain and wind was my Zuke. The entire front half of it snapped off completely, all the new fruit (all two of them)lost. There is new growth starting at the base of the plant so i am hoping to get a little more fruit this summer. My question is this....Can i remove all the large growth back to the new coming out of the ground and still expect fruit? Bandy