Eli5: Why do some plants flower briefly before growing vegetables? Do some flowers have vegetables we don’t eat?
In: Biology
I assume you mean vegetables with seeds inside such as squashes, cucumbers etc rather than the root or leaf vegetables? In terms of the plant, these structures with seeds inside are actually the fruit.
A fruit is a plants way of spreading its seeds. If a fruit is delicious, a creature will eat it and then poop out the seeds far away from the parent plant, so they can sprout and make new plants over a wide area. Humans have hijacked this by selectively breeding plants for the best fruit, even though we don’t spread their seeds in this way.
A plant flowers to attract pollinators. The bee (or whatever) is attracted to the flower, comes to drink the nectar inside, gets covered in pollen (the plant equivalent of sperm) and then spreads this pollen to the next flower. The pollen can fertilise the seeds in this plant and that stimulates the plant to develop fruit so that a hungry animal with eat it and spread its fertile seeds. So in this way, the flower is necessary just before the vegetable.
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