My acorn squash has been blooming and just started producing. I have 3 squash growing now. Due to not being sure there are many bees around I have been hand-pollinating.
But the past few days, I have discovered that something has discovered that the female flowers are good to eat :(

Three days ago I pollinated one blossom before I went to work. When I returned home in the evening, I was surprised to see that something had eaten off the entire flower, and had just left the small undeveloped fruit behind. The next morning, I saw that 2 more female flowers were eaten the same way... the flowers totally eaten, but the small pre-fruit left behind. So those must have happened at night, because they were fine the evening before.

I have not noticed the male flowers being attacked. So last night I covered up 4 blossoms with some netting. 3 were fine this morning. On the fourth one, I dont think I covered it well enough because I saw the netting had been moved over, and it was eaten. So I hand-pollinated the survivors, and covered them well. What a pain!

So here is what I know:
- female flowers preferred
- attack happened during the day (first time) and either night or very early morning (2nd incident).

Any idea what I am dealing with? A bird, a rabbit? A rat or squirrel?
I have seen rabbits in the area. I live in a pretty developed area, so there are no deer or other larger critters.

This post was edited by ccabal on Fri, May 23, 14 at 16:26