Hand-Pollinating Pumpkins: The Results Are In

It has been four days since I hand-pollinated two pumpkin blossoms on Thursday morning. I am pleased to announce that.... IT WORKED!!!!

Pumpkin A has grown considerably over the last four days, making me so glad that I did not sneak a peek ahead of time!

Just look at this little fella! Such lovely dark green lines on him, and looking like he's going to be an oblong little fella before we know it. :) 

This one has at least tripled in size! 

Again, YAAAAY!!!! WE DID IT!!! 

Pumpkin B is a little bit larger, and a little bit lighter green. Both of these little guys look deceptively like watermelon at the moment, but I promise you they are not. :) 

I could not be happier with the results of our little science experiment! Imagine that, dust a little pollen in the blossom and four days later you have actual baby pumpkins!! :)

You can bet your boots that I will be hand-pollinating every single female blossom I come into contact with after this. Our first plant (which I left to nature) did nothing at all. :/ The ovary simply dried up and fell off. 

This way is much more fun and productive. 

Of Pumpkins and Pollination

Of Pumpkins and Pollination

My pumpkins are out of control! haha At least, that is how it feels some days. They are wild and sprawling all over my yard and the other plants and I wouldn't have it any other way! I am absolutely delighted by them!

The picture at the top of the page is from this morning, while these other two first photos are about a week old. My pumpkin plants have grown even more and are taking up even more space now.

What merits this pumpkin-specific blog, you ask? Why am I prompted to keep gushing about them when I've already updated? Well, let me tell you. It turns out that they are mildly complicated little things! A while back I googled 'growing pumpkins' so that I could make a mental list of what all we are doing wrong and try to right it. 

I was fascinated to learn that pumpkins are different from their cucumber and tomato garden-buddies, in that a pumpkin blossom doesn't just die as a baby pumpkin grows. Far from it, in fact. Pumpkin blossoms have a gender! They are specifically male or female! 

Take a look at the pumpkin blossom in the picture to the right. Notice the long thin stem growing straight into a yellow blossom. :) 

This slender stem is known as the MALE pumpkin. These are the first to grow in a pumpkin plant. It is said that they serve the purpose of luring bees to the plant for pollination. The idea is that by the time the female blossoms mature and open, the plant is on the daily route of bees and has a better chance to be pollinated. 

That thought intrigued me greatly, and seemed a wonderful feat of nature. What, I wondered, does a female pumpkin blossom look like? 

It turns out that, true to my own life, the males are lean and the females are plump! lol Note the approximately golf-ball-sized green ball at the bottom of this blossom? That is what is called an ovary. 

This ovary looks like a baby pumpkin, and for good reason. If the female blossom is pollinated, the ovary becomes fertilized and will grow into the pumpkin fruit. Who knew?

We discovered the female blossom and her ovary/pumpkin in waiting pictured here too late to do anything about them. 

As of this morning the blossom has dropped off of the ovary and we are waiting with baited breath to see if she begins to grow into a fruit in the next four days or simply drops off, unfertilized. 

Come on! Are we pregnant or not!?!?!

I was so inspired by this little girl (and her two other tiny friends we just discovered a day or so ago) that I decided to look up this whole male/female thing again. This time I read articles and I watched videos on YouTube. I ended up running across countless videos about how to pollinate your own pumpkin blossoms by hand. Wow! You mean that I can make pumpkins happen all on my lonesome??? Of course I am going to try it! 

I learned that female blossoms open first thing in the morning and are only available for a few hours, so I went out this morning to take a peek. OH MY SOUL!! I have not one but TWO more pumpkin gals right up front that I did not even know were there! I MUST pollinate these suckers right away!! How did I miss them, when the differences are so obvious? They are sitting on the grass and while I do look at my pumpkins, I haven't been handling them (so as not to disturb them). Anyway, back to the business at hand. 

These females were apparent, not because of their swollen ovaries (hidden in the grass beneath them), but because of their carpels. 

The carpels (seen here in the very center of the blossom) are the little prongs growing out of the middle of the flower. They're growing directly out of the bottom of the ovary. 

This pumpkin flower has six carpels. 

These carpels need to have really good contact with pollen in order to fertilize the pumpkin (ovary) behind the blossom and encourage growth. 

This pollen comes from the stamen of a male plant. Notice on the right how the male plant has but one prong in the center? That is the stamen, and it is covered in the fluffy yellow pollen that bees crave so intensely. Speaking of which....

This is a honey bee. :) They are in short supply these days because there are fewer flowers, and in general pesticides have caused them to get sick. Entire hives can die from it. This is why we use only organic pest control in our garden.

I was concerned because I have seen sweat bees, carpenter bees, wasps and the like, but not a single honey bee. This morning I found four of them dancing around my garden! 

Now, do I think the world population of bees is suddenly going to disappear? No. Do I think it is my responsibility as a human being and as a child of God to care tenderly for His creations? I do! In fact, I link it to being good stewards of God's planet. :) We may use the planet, but let's take care of it, shall we? One doesn't have to fear that we're trashing the earth to extinction to care about how we treat it. Okay, back off of the soap box. ;)

As gently as I could, I collected a male pumpkin blossom and removed the petals. The idea is to do this carefully so that you do not knock the pollen off of the stamen.

Once the stamen was exposed and the stem had the look of a paint brush, I gently 'painted' pollen from the stamen on and around the carpels of the female blossom. You can see here I made sure to brush the inside as well as the outside. :)

Ideally, I would have liked to use two male blossoms for each of the female flowers I hand-pollinated... BUT there is the matter of my sweet little friends the honey bees. 

When I approached they became a little bit erratic. By the time I had stolen a blossom and stripped it of the petals, they were getting anxious. While I was pollinating the first flower, they were freaking out around my head and ears telling me in no uncertain terms "BUZZ OFF!!!" hehe

I finished hand pollinating with one flower for each female, and headed around the back of the bales to get a couple more male blossoms that had good, thick pollen on them... aaaand then noticed that the sweet little bees were in full-on freak out mode. In fact, they pounced on the next blossom I was after, and three of them went at it! I got a video of their angry little bee fight. When they fell off in a bee ball, I took my bare toes as far away from that patch of grass as I could. lol 

Did my girlies get fertilized? Will I have two precious little pumpkins to show for my care and concern? I am honestly not sure. We'll know in a few days (hopefully), and I'll be sure to tell you.  Maybe next time I will get to use two stamens for each set of carpels, and gently tie the petals closed so the bees can't steal the pollen away from the female blossom... we'll see. In the meantime, I have learned a lot and had a truly interesting and unique experience.

Winged Things

The Dragonfly

This is going to be short.

No, really! I know you have no reason to believe me, but it is true! In direct contrast to the rest of the blog, this is just a quick post to show you a few grainy pictures of my favorite winged insects. 

The Damselfly

The dragonflies and damselfies are our most frequent winged visitors during the afternoon, and come in a range of colors. Dragonflies are much larger and rest with wings out to the side. 

Damselflies are smaller, and rest with wings closed over their back. The metallic blue dameslflies are my favorite, although the one pictured is blue and black. 

The Humble Sweat Bee

Bees are another backyard and garden staple. We have spent the summer so far in cohabitation with carpenter bees, eye bongers (aggressive, large, fuzzy bumblebees), wasps, and these shiny metallic fellas - the sweat bee. 

This is a closely cropped picture, as you can barely see this guy as a speck on the huge pumpkin leaf he was using. Shocked that he didn't fly away, I took his picture up close. I didn't realize until I looked at it cropped even closer on the computer that he did not move because he is snacking on another small something or other. :)

I have a new favorite this morning, but will mention them in the next blog post.

Straw Bale Garden Update! :)

Finally! An update! :)

This is a photo of my straw bale garden first thing this morning. :) All four bales are fully in use now (finally), and as you can see, things are really growing! This is an update on the veggies and fruits so far, both picked and on the vine. :)

Our prettiest plants by far (and also the most thriving) are the cucumber and pumpkin plants. 

While it used to be a simple matter of 'cucumber on the left, pumpkin on the right' you can see that they have now intertwined. :) Can you spot the small yellow cucumber blossoms on the half of the bale with the larger pumpkin blossoms? 

If you look even more carefully, you might notice the little vine of leaves that is now growing on top of the bale to the left of the cucumbers... those are pumpkin!! It has wound through the cucumber plant and onto the broccoli bale, where it is now sneaking tendrils towards our newest plant...



Introducing our very first watermelon sprout! This is a 'sugar baby' watermelon and is said to get between 6 and 12 pounds, have high yield, a sweet taste, be drought resistant, and have a shorter season. 

This makes him a good match for us, since we seeded at the beginning of July instead of in June. The long, thin green sneaking up on him is the pumpkin vine two plants away. I may have to release that tendril so it doesn't choke the watermelon seedling out.

Back to the cucumbers for a moment. They began to produce little cukes last week! :) A few of them turned yellow and died while they were still small, but two others took heart and really began to grow!

This is what they look like on the vine while they are still in the middle of the growth process. You may be able to tell by looking that they are very prickly... or as Giraffe says, 'poinky'. :)

These are the first two cucumbers we picked. It turned out that we grabbed the guy on the left a smidgen too soon. He was mostly crunchy flesh, almost no seed whatsoever, and was light green in color. We will wait longer to pick the other cucumbers still waiting on the vine. 

Don't mind my nails here... I finally used that Mother's Day gift certificate on the last weekend in June to get my nails done, and I wanted a little nod to Independence Day. :)

Tomatoes of all three varieties are growing now. I have hopes that I will end up with more beefsteak tomatoes than I know what to do with!

Pictured here is the first beefsteak fruit that showed up, and is on the vine growing out of a straw bale. This plant now has four to six tiny fruits growing. I am excited to see how big they get, and to have them ripened and ready for tomato sandwiches!

This little beefy baby is one of the guys growing from the big planter we let get out of control. I can see at least six of these little guys from any given angle, and generally get up to around fifteen before I quit counting. If I can keep these plants alive, we should be rich with tomatoes the rest of the growing season. :)

I did what I could, tying plants to the tomato gate, but when you have let 26 plants grow out of control, you inevitably end up with a mess...

This mess, to be exact. These are the tomato plants from the planter, and as you can tell some of them have fallen over. 

In fact, the entire planter fell over! It is (as you can tell) being propped up by the red wagon my children will now not be using for the rest of the summer. lol

We actually popped a few heavy stones on the back of the planter so that (between the weight and the wagon) it will not fall over again. This group of plants is now taller than both Giraffe and Koala!

You might think they cannot possibly survive with so little soil to share, but I am keeping them watered and fertilized. So far, so good. 

The broccoli has also begun to thrive, although you can see that pests have done some serious damage to the leaves. Not long after snapping this photo we bolstered the plants with more rich dirt around the base, and a good covering of dirt for the whole bale. 

The watermelon are planted to the right of the broccoli. Hopefully they will join the pumpkin and cukes in taking over the yard before we know it! ;) 

We also purchased some diatomaceous earth to spread around the plants as an organic pest-control option. We over-did it on the pumpkin plant, and some of the leaves ended up looking quite dusty. However, I will say that my plants do seem relatively pest-free this morning and the bees are still able to light on the blossoms to pollinate. So far I am very pleased with it. :)

The celery is still growing very well by the house. In the morning it gets a nice good dose of direct sunlight, and is quickly overcome by shadow from the house. This is good, because if it were in direct sun all day it would wilt. 

You can see that we took a clean plastic cup, removed the bottom, and pressed the stalks up through so that they can grow straight and tall.

It turns out that this has also been very helpful with pest control, although we have had some small slugs enjoying themselves on the leaves. :) We did remove that bit of plastic which blew into the yard and hid up against it... in case you are wondering. ;)

The sugar snap peas are still growing well, and if I would ever locate the packet I started them from we would have many more! For some reason, I have misplaced it. 

Pictured here are the first four pea pods we harvested. Giraffe was unfamiliar with how to pick peas, and I did not think to tell her, so these look a little rough. No big deal though; she is learning as we go, just like I am! :)




Here are the crisp and hearty peas that were in those pods. :) They were not enough to boil or steam, but I would not have had the chance anyhow. 

As it turns out, Koala is nuts for sugar snap peas and Giraffe prefers the pods they came in! These babies were gone in absolutely no time at all. :)


There is more to show and more to say, but I am tired and isn't there always? I am having the literal best summer of my life. It has nothing to do with finances or health, friends or circumstances. It has everything to do with my little family living in our little house and growing our little garden in our little back yard. :) The days are spent busily playing out of doors in the water, sliding on slides, swinging on swing, swimming in inflatable pools (or whooshing down slip 'n slides), barbecuing with husband, watching more fireworks than we can count shoot off around the neighborhood, watering and tending our plants... in so many words, it is heaven on earth. :) I am experiencing a level of contentment unparalleled to any other period of my life. The Lord has been so very good to us. I could not ask for more. :)