Backgarden Pumpkin Patch 2023 (part 2)

My first attempt at growing a pumpkin

If you’ve headed here from (Part one), you’ll know that I was, for some unknown reason, completely certain that the only female bud we could find was going to die before a male bloomed.

I was right, I don’t know how I knew but I just did, my little lady bloomed and not a single male was ready to pollinate her, they popped up 3 days later, so she died, and to be completely honest I cried and considered pulling them up.

I didn’t pull them up. Instead, my fiancé helped me search every single bud on every vine we could get to, in the hope of finding a few more females, and we did we found 4 more little ones growing. All 4 were different sizes, so I tried to hold out hope that one, just one would be open on the same day as a male.

To my suprise, the largest female we found didn’t flower first. In fact, it was one of the smaller ones, I spotted her turn yellow and checked on her almost every hour until I went to bed, like she’d open the same day she started her colour change.

When she finally opened, there were plenty of males open to pollinate her but not a single pollinator to be seen. I had actually been sent a link about hand pollinating my a friend of mine that I kept sharing my daily updates to, so I set to work and pollinated her myself.

Que impatiently waiting and checking on the freshly pollinated flower every 30 seconds for 2 days, and then her flower just fell off, possibly due to the heat, and I had no idea what would happen next because Google wasn’t helping, so I just had to wait.

When I noticed her flower had fallen off, it was only because I had noticed another female had opened. So I hand pollinated her and started to watch her every 30 seconds, and on day 2, there was absolutely no denying she was growing, she’d almost doubled in size! Plus, it showed that the first pollinated female wasn’t growing.

Plus there were soo many females that suddenly seemed to have popped up overnight and were almost all ready to start turning yellow. Meaning I couldn’t leave them alone, I was in the garden day and night watching them all grow and talking to them like a crazy person.