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This was such good info. from Ellendra that I am reposting it here -- further discussion this evening, if I'm not too exhausted!

I had a squash that was being stubborn and not flowering, and to make things worse it’s a variety that, according to some sources, is day-length sensitive. Which means it won’t flower until the days and nights are equal, which at my latitude means they’d flower just in time for frost to kill them off.

The other squash varieties were flowering nicely, so it clearly was not a nutrient problem. I decided to test another tactic. According to Diana, if a fruit tree is old enough to be flowering but isn’t, you can get it to flower by beating it with a rolled-up newspaper. It sounds crazy, but plants often respond to damage by reproducing. If you can convince the plant that it’s in danger without actually harming it, you can often trick the plant into flowering faster.

Since these were squash, I skipped the newspaper and went a different route. Group 1 I clipped the end of one vine from each plant. Group 2 I stepped on the end of a vine, just barely hard enough to leave a bruise. Group 3 I did both, and group 4 I left alone as a control group.

The ones that were both clipped and bruised started flowering 2 days later. By the end of the week, all the plants that had been bruised were in flower. In the control group, the only one to flower has been a plant that got walked on by a deer, which means it technically was bruised too. Similar results with the ones that were only clipped. After 2 weeks, I went around and gave a single bruise to all the plants from groups 1 and 4 that I could reach, but this time I did it by bending the growing tip back on itself. Within a week they had all flowered.

I posted these results to a plant-breeding forum so it can be tested with other day-length sensitive species, and early results are promising. It might work with your opo next time. Just a little tiny bruise, at the end of a single branch, for every plant. That’s enough to signal the plant that it’s in danger without seriously harming the plant. The way in which the bruise is delivered doesn’t seem to matter, but I do recommend putting near the growing tip of the vine, so that if it winds up being more damaging than you intended it won’t cripple the plant.