Zucchini (Courgette) had double headed flowers

The zucchini have started to flower, but there is something a little curious: two of our zucchini plants have double headed flowers.

The male zucchini start flowering earlier than female ones, so we don’t have female flowers open yet. Those “twin” flowers are only male flowers so far. I was a bit worried as this has never happened to us before.

Then, today, I found one of the marigolds which is also double headed.

The zucchini plants with the double headed male flowers also have normal (single) male flowers. It may not be a big issue, but I want to know why it could happen.

I did some research and found out that it’s not so rare to have “twin” flowers, especially if the plant is exposed to cold weather during the flower bud differentiation period.

This year we started sowing in April, but at the end of May we had a sudden drop in temperature and a frost, and after that we had a lot of ups and downs, so that may be the reason.

We are probably going to artificially pollinate the zucchini, so I check if there are any female flowers opened every morning. At the moment there is one female flower bud, but the flowers have not opened yet. I think it will open in a couple of days.

Since zucchini’s flowers are edible, we can enjoy male flowers anyway. I added them to our salad the other day. The flowers were sweet and delicious and the salad looked uplifting with the extra yellow colour.

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