My Kabocha plant has successfully formed it's first fruit!You can see the fruit in the right center of the picture to the right. You can also see two fruit that aborted.
I have had a hard time getting any fruit to develop on this Kabocha plant. The Kabocha plant started producing flowers 6 weeks ago (see this blog entry), but it has taken this long to produce any real fruit.
The problem is that the plant produced many more female flowers than male flowers, so when a female flower is ready to be pollinated, there aren't any male flowers to supply the pollen.
I should start getting a lot more fruit to develop as the ratio of male flowers to female flowers is starting to increase.
Below is a picture of how many Kabocha plant looks. It has climbed onto the Trellis I built quite nicely.
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Thanks for the pictures. Far north of you in Montana, I had a bunch of squash plant volunteers come up this spring. I didn't know what kind of squash they were, but I transplanted them along a trellis. But, like yours, most fruit would grow to the size of a golf ball and then die. I thought it was some kind of hybrid and pulled out most of the plants. Then a couple weeks ago, in the remaining three plants, I noticed one fruit starting to really grow. Now there are six fruits 3-5 inches in diameter and the prospect of five or six more fruits look good.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm a happy camper to find that the kabocha we threw into the compost last year is actually bearing fruit. And that I was having a problem with pollination, not hybrid seeds.
BTW, I found your site via a google search for "kabocha picture".
Thanks.
Jon in Montana