Hi, Martha. I hope I understand your question correctly. This is how each fruit on a squash plant grows. The plant produces male flowers on long stems. It also produces female flowers and those are the ones with the little squash attached at the back of the flower. Either a bee or you need to get the pollen from the male flower to the female flower for pollination to occur. At that point, the squash begins to grow and you can cut it from the plant whenever you want. You can use little baby squash with the female flower still attached or you can let it grow to up to around six inches long or up to about four inches across for patty pans. If you want to pollinate yourself, you can use a Q Tip and collect some pollen from the inside of the male flower and transfer it to the inside of the female flower--squash sex, basically. There are a few varieties of squash that are still good at around ten inches, but for the most part, smaller is better when it comes to squash, before the seeds get big and the skin gets tough. I hope that's what you were asking. If you want to use the blossoms and batter and fry them, I'd wait until I was pretty sure the squash had been pollinated.
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Michele
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