You learn something every day!

I was wandering around inspecting the plants in the vegetable bed the other day when I discovered something strange. While my cucumber and squash plants had been flowering for a couple of days, now there were flowers with miniature squash and cucumbers growing behind them. Now I expected to see this, eventually, as I knew that's how the squash and cucumbers developed, but the thing I couldn't understand was why the flowers growing on the ends of these tiny veggies were either new, or hadn't even opened yet.

Now, my vegetable growing experience consists mostly of tomatoes - and tomatoes flower, get polinated, the flower dies and a small green tomato forms where the flower had been. So these squash flowers were confusing me.

Enter the internet - answerer of many questions. I hit wikipedia and found this little tidbit:

"the flowers come in pollen-bearing male form, and the ovary-bearing female
form, with both forms being present on the plant."

So there you go - those first flowers were all males, and now my plants are starting to make female flowers. And let me just add that the tiny little yellow zucchini are really adorable. I will attempt to capture the cuteness this weekend.