Courgette issues! - Fruits not developing/growing more than a few inches!

[colonel]

Hi there,

My courgette plants seemed to be doing really well, got quite a few courgettes and flowers on. Some of the courgettes were pollinated and seemed to be growing well but now haven't really grown beyond a couple of inches long! Does any one know what the reason could be for the lack of development?

The plants are outside in 40 cm pots, same as I did last year. The weather has turned over the last couple of weeks and there has been a lot of rain and cloud and not much sun. So I am hoping a bit of sun could help the fruit develop!

If anyone has any advice about what to do or what is causing this I would be most grateful.

One more quick question; what can I do with squash and courgettes that have split stems that seems to be affecting the plants? Can I mound up soil around the stems? or will they rot? These are not the same plants referred to in the other question.

Thanks in advance for any replies and tips.

Happy growing everyone

[DannyK]

Dry? I also use tomato fertilizer.

[nickdub]

Try hand pollinating them by snapping off a male flower and using that to spread pollen on any open female ones.

[ameno]

Almost certainly incomplete pollination. Sometimes the fruit will seem to have been pollinated, and grow a little, only to give and die because pollination was insufficient (each courgette has dozens of seeds, each seed needs to be pollinated by a separate grain of pollen, and a minimum number of those seeds needs to have been pollinated in order for the fruit to grow properly).
As recommended above, hand pollinate.

Another possibility is lack of water, but in this cool weather lately that's less likely.

As for the split stems, it's usually safe to just ignore them. They seldom do the plant any harm, even when the split seems significant. One of my squash plants last year snapped almost completely through close to ground level - the stem was maybe a quarter attached at best - and it still healed over and continued growing as though nothing had happened.
If you really want to mound up soil around the split section then that should be fine (squash readily produce roots from buried lengths of stem), as long as you wait a week or so after the split occurred, in order to allow the wound to callous over, but it's not really necessary.

[colonel]

Thanks for the replies, think I will cut off the small courgettes and hand pollinate the next ones to appear.