courgettes have no female flowers

They need to be pollinated by winged mini beasts, if you make a small pom-pom and tie it on to a bamboo cane, insert it into the flower cups and pollinate them yourself, this works on tomatoes and any other above ground veg that produces flowers before fruit. i remember doing this in my Mums greenhouse when I was very small and I have done the same with my Jenny since

Thanks for that Andrea, but the problem is that some plants have not even produced female flowers to pollinate. Is there something wrong with the soil??

Sorry, not too experienced with veg soil. But I think that a courgette is something that doesn't need to be rotated like other crops and can be planted anywhere, as long s the soil is well prepared and manure and organic matter has been added, I don't really know what could be going wrong. Maybe you should try a different variety this year?

Hmm, I have been adding organic matter in the form of my home made compost but no manure... maybe I could add some Growmore; is that fairly organic? or perhaps I should buy some manure. I'll definitely collect some horse manure and rot it down for next year.

I really don't know what to suggest, you seem to be doing the plant care very well, but maybe this might help, I find things like this on google

http://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profiles0702/courgette_failure.asp

From the RHS website so it should be pretty accurate, copy and paste it into your web browser

Thanks for that Andrea, it's thrown light on something I hadn't considered. Last year I grew the courgettes in grow bags from Focus (which were poor quality in my opinion, looking more like bark chips, my friend also used these with poor results). However, I had positioned the growbags on upturned metal containers which may have made the soil too cold, especially at night time.

I'll try one more time this year!

I put mine in terrecotta pots so there was enough depth and the heat was good, maybe that might be more efficient than a grow bag.