My first attempt at growing a pumpkin

If you haven’t read part 1 or Part 2, then you may want to so you know what I’m going on about. If you have, thank you for sticking around, this is where things actually get exciting 🤣

So, as you know, my first little pumpkin babies flower fell off before the Internet told me it would, and I was so worried that she had stopped growing. She hadn’t! then I worked out that there was a large chance she wouldn’t be ready for Halloween, but I didn’t care because she was my baby, and just watching her grow was enough to make me happy.

I also had a second little queen growing, who also probably wouldn’t be ready for Halloween, but again, I was just happy to watch her grow. I then realised that due to planting them so late, there was probably no chance of having a pumpkin ready for Halloween. I know better for next year now, so it’s not a fail in any way.

During one of my daily sits next to the pumpkins, you know, to watch them grow 🤣 I noticed a double male flower getting ready to open, and so the next morning, I ran out to see him in all his glory and he did not disappoint! What a stunning flower he was!

As the days seemed to fly past, the 2 little pumpkins kept getting bigger and bigger, and then one day, I noticed a third one growing that had been pollinated by the bees still buzzing around the plants.

This brings me to today. It is October 2nd, 2023, and I was planning to leave this post as a draft until my first was ready to be cut off, but we have more females still opening, and I’m shocked so I wanted to post this today so that my next pumpkin patch post is when it’s all dried and shrivelled so I can post an update on them all as my fiancé pollinated one of the 2 females that opened today and I’m going to use them as an experiment.

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.