Sunday 24 August 2014

Monoecious



This year I have expanded my cucurbits from the usual one (courgettes) to four (add cucumber, Kabocha and Fig Leaf Gourd).

Up until now I have merrily removed all the male flowers from my courgettes and I have been doing the same for the melons/squashes/gourds/pumpkins. I remembered reading somewhere that if you left them the fruit might get bitter.  Doing a bit more reading, so as to figure out how to look after my new additions, I came across the word "monoecious" which derives form the Greek "One House".  In botanical terms it means that a plant produces both male and female flowers. Then the penny dropped: by removing all the male flowers there is the risk of making the plant infertile and fruit not setting properly or developing at all. Of course there is little danger of catching every male flower given that the plot is across town and the most I visit it is twice a week, but the couple of extra fig leaf melons I planted out under my nose at home have failed to produce any fruit. Now I think I know why - my over enthusiastic male flower snipping. No longer: now the "non productive" male flowers get to stay as long as they like.  Despite all this there have still been quite a number of young  fruit that have shown signs of rot and/or dropped off in the recent bout of cold weather.

Dioecious is where each plant produces flowers of just one sex. Examples are Holly,  Asparagus and (to my horror) Mulberry trees. This explains why our solitary specimen has failed to produce fruit to date!!!  Now I have to figure out which sex it is and order another sex specific tree.

p.s. You get some rather unhelpful results if you Google "How to sex a mulberry bush", but I have discovered that I need to wait until next spring and examine the flowers.

5 comments:

  1. You could use the superfluous male flowers for making "Stuffed Courgette Flowers", using cream cheese or something. Or deep-fry them in tempura batter?

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    1. I must get around to that. There are certainly plenty of them.

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  2. I've always wondered about advice to remove male flowers - we never have. Our kiwis are a male and a female and the makl just doesn't flower. The female doesn't have stamen so no pollen. Do what do they call a plant where each flower has male and female parts ? :)

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    1. That's synoecious, "Together in the house", I guess. The RHS puts bitterness down to the overproduction of plant defence chemicals in cross pollinated cucurbit seed, most likely to occur in saved seed. They've got a really article at the following link:

      https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=676

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  3. Really enjoyed this blog post. Had so many male flowers on my plants this year and not as many squash as I had hoped. But, enough for the winter. Again, great post.

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