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melons and squash-fruit turns yellow and falls off

17 years ago

Hi all my first posting here

I've been planting watermelons, zucchini, pumpkins, and acorn squash for several years. This problem has happened to some extent every year, and it's happening again...The plants are growing fine, but when they begin putting on fruit, the baby fruits turn yellow and fall fron the vine. on the zucchini the beginning of the fruit stays green and keeps growing, but the tail end turns yellow and soft, eventually going rotten. On everything else, the fruits just stop growing first...a few days later, they are soft and either turning yellow or they just fall off. Especially the first few fruits that show up on the watermelon, they all do this. Later on in the season, I usually end up getting a few watermelons to grow. By then they are so far behind that I don't harvest any til mid-september! The zucchini I have gotten about half of the fruits so far this year, the other half get this problem and get tossed. Can this be fixed?

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Comments (3)

jean001
17 years ago
Lack of pollination.

But you can be the "bee." Just move the pollen from a male blossom (never has a small fruit under it) onto the sticky peg in the center of the female flowers (the ones with the "baby" fruits from day one).
walleyeguy
Original Author
17 years ago
Thanks for the reply, I'll try it... the zucchini I think it's something else still though. They grow from one end and rot away from the other.
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Thanks Dave, I've already snipped off one each of the squashes. I'm probably going to leave the watermelon plants alone. They're both starting to vine and lay away from each other. I'm going to give them a good side dressing of fertilizer and let them do their thing. I don't expect much from these anyway since it's a long season variety planted late in the year. These were started as a seed germination test and I thought they would croak once put out in our heat. So far so good. Wade
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I've had plenty of bees and other little pollinating bugs so I don't think that's a problem for them (and I added a little extra help too so I'm sure they're pollinated). I did get them started late this year (because of illness), but they have been blooming well since the end of June. I think the major problem was the 100 degree heat we had for such a long stretch. It's cooled down these past couple of weeks and I've seen a new enthusiasm in blooming since then so I wonder if the extreme heat kept the female blooms from setting on. I'm in the process of setting up an indoor aquaponics system so I will be able to bring them inside and I should have my grow lights by then. Hopefully that will be enough to finish off the fruit. (And today I just saw a second unopened female bloom on the squash.) Thanks for the 5 week info. I've seen a lot of places with info on how long from seed to maturity, but not on how long it takes after the fruit starts.
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Thank you, kimmsr. The article you attached explains it very well. I didn't understand that multiple visits by bees were better than one. I'm glad to know it's not something that I'm doing wrong or a disease. LL
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S M
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