Last year I grew my first pumpkins. I'd tried before, but I think I always left it too late for them to be successful. Last year I learned that pumkins spread, a lot! They will also grow up things, not just along the ground as I'd envisaged before seeing how easily they'll scale a fence or wrap themselves tight around a lemon tree! My pumkins last year new no boundaries, so this year I've put them in a different garden away from too much other stuff, but they've still taken over.
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Pumpkin spread, here it's escaped the garden and heading onto the outside footpath. |
This years seed came from a pumkin my mum bought that I'd never seen before. She purchased it around Halloween, so it was probably a special type, not sure. I can say it was large, and not the typical Queensland Blue or Jap I'm used too, not even a butternut. So official pumpkin type unknown, but very round. I struck the seeds in punnets before planting them out, and even gave Mum some too as a thankyou for keeping the seeds for me. The resulting vine looks like it's on steroids!! The vines have giant leaves, and the baby pumpkins that form under the flowers are huge too. But to date, not one has taken. They have all just died and dropped off the vine. And it's not just something unique to me or my garden, Mum's haven't a single pumkin under way yet, and in past years I've been more than a little jealous of their pumkin successes.
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Baby pumpkin dies and drops off. |
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Section of pumkin vine showing female flower (characterised by the swell of the baby pumpkin below it) forming. |
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| Female flower dies back and the baby pumpkin starts to grow in size below it. |
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Last year, I did learn that they have both male and female flowers, and it's from the base of the female flowers that the pumpkins develop.
My vines have produced lots of male flowers,
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| Male flower, I noticed the stamen is quite different on the female flower but didn't have my camera with me at the time. |
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| The male flower is usually on a longer narrower stem and doesn't have the bulge of the baby pumpkin directly under the flower. |
especially at the beginning, and have only produced female flowers in the last few weeks. There's not been many bees around the flowers that I've seen so I'm wondering if mother nature needs a hand this year with the pollinating.
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I wondered whether the giant leaves are hiding the flowers a little too much, preventing the bees from seeing them? |
When I checked Mum's vines today it seemed as though the she had the same, but at least she had female flowers that were still open, so I used a feather and manually pollinated the female flowers with pollen from the male flowers. Hopefully that will give her some success. Now if only I can manage to catch my vines with the female flowers still open. If you have any other ideas what could be going wrong, please help, any advice is gratefully received.
In the meantime, I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope, as these are the only pumpkin seedlings I put in this year. If I don't have any success it will just mean I'm back to buying my pumpkins again.
