Be the Bee. Hand-pollinating pumpkins.

October is almost here. If you decided to plant pumpkins back in July, you probably have some nice, big, viney plants by now. Bees may be in abundance, but sometimes even though you may have bugs and bees in your garden your pumpkins will not be pollinated enough to make the cut. I'm going to teach you how to hand-pollinate your pumpkin flowers to help them along and hopefully get more pumpkins out of your pumpkin plants (cause if you've grown them before and realize how much work they take, you had better get lots of pumpkins for a reward for all your hard work!). :) There are two kinds of pumpkin blossoms, male and female. The male blossoms grow in abundance. They are the flowers that are connected directly to a skinny stem. They look like this:

Girl blossoms are more rare. In my garden I have something like 30 male blossoms and only 4 or 5 female ones right now. The girl blossoms are connected to a teeny tiny little pumpkin that is connected to a thicker stem. They look like this:

Early in the morning is when all the mature blossoms that are ready to fertilize or to be fertilized, open up. So you want to go out in the morning to do this. Probably somewhere between 7am and 9am. All you have to do is pick a male flower (and you don't have to feel guilty because there are SO many of them), pull off its petals, then rub the pollen laden anthers onto the stigma of the female flower until you cover the entire stigma with pollen. Sometimes I use 2 flowers to accomplish this as the bees tend to steal a lot of the pollen out of the flowers (even the female flowers after you hand-pollinate them so make sure there is plenty there for all). After a day or two, the flower will begin to fade, and if it takes, the little baby pumpkin will being to grow. Pretty easy way to increase your crop's output, huh? Also, did you know that pumpkin blossoms are edible? I have not tried this yet, but if you are interested in cooking pumpkin flowers to eat, try this recipe: Tempura Pumpkin Blossoms.