The Squash Blooms

In 1977 I was eleven years old and there was a very popular song that played on the radio by the Commodores, called "Easy Like Sunday Morning."  It's such a smooth song and seems far too happy to be a song about breaking up!  Sunday mornings are easy - and happy.  I think I've explained that on weekends, we sleep a little later and normally go out and milk the cows and goat at around 7:30 prior to washing up and going to church.

On workdays, we're going out in the dark and you really miss a lot of the sights and sounds of the new day. On Sunday mornings I get a chance to see the sun as it is filtering through the trees from the eastern horizon. The breeze is cool and the lighting is perfect.  I'll normally carry my camera to capture anything that might jump out at me.  This Sunday, the blooms on all of the squash were opening up wide, as if to call me to stop what I'm doing and observe the splendor that I miss on other mornings.  The blooms open up wide in the morning and close at night.  You can see that the ants have made their way to the inside of this squash flower.  There must be something sweet in the flower that is attracting the ants.

Ants in the Flower

But ants aren't the only thing that these flowers attract.  Can you see what's in the middle of this one?  A little blurry, I know.

Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit.  Aha!  A honeybee.  If you look closely he's got sticky pollen stuck all over his legs and under-carriage and tail.  He's liking this flower and he's probably one of the guys that live in the column by our side door.  I appreciate all of his hard work in pollinating the vegetables in the garden and he's precisely the reason I don't have someone come remove the colony of bees from our side door.  Maybe I should call them our "columny" of bees?  I stood out in the squash patch for a while watching the bees fly from flower to flower doin' work.

Pollinating Honeybees

There are male squash flowers and female squash flowers.  The way you tell them apart is the female flowers have a small, enlarged part at the base of the flower that will become the fruit of the squash plant.  Can you see it in the photo below?

Female Squash Flower

The male flower is a more showy flower that is on a longer, very straight stalk than the female flower.  It does not form fruit.  Can you see the difference in the male flower below from the female flower above?

Male Squash Flower

Although I've never tried them, I hear that you can pick the male flowers and stuff them with cheese and fry them.  I'm gonna try this.  Since they don't produce fruit, you're not losing anything by picking them.  Just make sure to leave enough male flowers for the honeybees to collect the pollen from the male flowers and go to the female flowers to fertilize them.  If you pick all the male blooms for frying, you won't have any squash.

From what I see in our garden, there are many more male flowers than female ones. These blooms are as pretty as anything you'll see in a fancy flower arrangement. One thing you want to be careful with when growing squash is harvesting.  Squash grow quickly and I find they are best when young - both for yellow squash and zucchini. Yellow squash should be picked when pale yellow.  Sometimes we don't harvest as often as we should and they get overripe and turn dark yellow and hard.  I hate when that happens.  Once they start flowering, it's best to stroll through the squash patch and harvest every day.

Bright Yellow Blooms

The brilliant yellow blooms are as bright as the sunshine and as long as the bees do their job, we'll have plenty of squash to saute in butter, grill with butter and garlic, and make cheesy, buttery casseroles with.  If you go back through the pictures, you can spot baby squash in most of them, including one at the seven o'clock position in the picture above.