Beginner Gardening: Yellow Crookneck Squash (bush variety) Question, 4 by jminator22

jminator22 wrote:
I am growing a couple of yellow dropped squash plants that were planted from seed, I believe the seed brand was seeds of change. The plants are in a raised bed that is about 18 inches deep. The pictured plant started off growing much quicker than my other squash plants. I spotted the first tiny female bloom about 4 weeks ago. It has grown very slowly and is currently about 3 inches long, the largest squash in the pictures below. It has grown maybe an inch a week, if that. I check on it every day and it only had a very small flower on it that shriveled up. There have only been a few flowers that have opened up, I check every morning so that I can hand pollinate when the flowers open. It seems that a lot of the flowers don't mature and shrivel up before ever getting to mature size. There is also another small squash that looks like the flower fell off of, but there was never an open flower on it. This is also pictured below.

The plant is a bush type and is growing very compact. Almost all of the blooms have been buried pretty deep under the older large leaves. The plant is just now getting a lot of new growth on top with a couple of new female blooms, but are still very small. Do the fruit producing blooms on this type of squash produce large flowers that are the same size as the male flowers? Could this issue be because of the blooms being covered by all of the older growth? Maybe there was too much nitrogen and the plant was focusing on leave production? I am hoping that the new blooms will begin to produce fruit.

I have a couple of zucchini plants that are thriving in an adjacent bed with the same soil mix, which is watered the same. These were planted at the same time and I have been picking zucchini off of them for the past 2 weeks. The weather has been 75-85 over the past few weeks and just started warming up into the 90s this week. I have been feeding them with a water soluble fertilizer every couple of weeks. The package said to use every 7 days.

Let me know if you need any more information, and thank you in advance.