help with summer squash

my father in law grows zucchini and yellow crookneck squash, and his plants are always huge. I planted late last year and mine got zapped by squash bugs. This year, I planted earlier, but the plants are really tiny and already blooming. Should I pick off the blooms to encourage the plants to get bigger, or do they have enough leaves to start producing fruit? they probably only have 2 or 3 sets of true leaves at this point and they are about 3-4 inches tall

not sure pinching the blossoms wiil help. If the plant can't support them they will abort anyway. The real question is why are your plants so stunted. Did you start them inside and transplant? If so they could have gotten stunted in the pots. Is your soil loose and fertile? If not you will need to amend and fertilize. You have plenty of time for direct succession plantings, so I would suggest that you stick a few seeds into a loose amended and fertilized plot for insurance, in case yours do not grow out of thier funk,

They should be about this size when they begin blooming.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the bed--it is raised and before I planted everything this year I mixed in 2 lbs of blood meal and 2 lbs superphosphate--the tomatoes and beans are doing great--the squash were transplants, but they didn't have true leaves when I transplanted--I will try fertilizing them with something that can be absorbed right away and see how that does--the organics sometimes take a while to kick in--I will stick some seeds in just in case like you said--could it also be it's not warm enough for squash yet? we've had lows in the 40-50's and highs in the 60-70's, so it has been unusually cool this month

I hope you don't mind if I chime in with another question about yellow crooknecks and their habits...

Mine started off with tons of female flowers but no males (a little odd), so now I have lots of aborted squash hanging onto the plant. Should I be removing those, or just let them drop off and do their thing?

I just let them do their thing. The hybrids often start with female blossoms and this year all of mine have. The open pollinated ones usually have male flowers for a considerable time before the females appear.

Okay, thanks Farmerdill!

Sorry, but I am EXTREMELY new at this, how do you tell a female flower from a male flower?

I have the same problem with my crook neck squash, but the zucchini I planted is doing fine and I have ONE, lol, zucchini on it already.

Not so with the crooknecks...they look very small and the blooms just are not making any squashes.

The female flower sits on a baby squash. The males just have small straight stems.