Last year, one of the kids came home from school with a squash vine growing out of a plastic cup. I'm sure all the parents out there can relate: the pale stalk grown absurdly long, with only a couple tiny leaves attached to the top for form's sake? Well, we nurtured this plant and transfered it outdoors. It grew, and it grew. And it grew some more. It became huge! But we never got a squash. Not one. No one was dissapointed... we don't eat a lot of squash.
The sight of these pumpkins on my vine fills me with joy! And even if I only get enough pumpkins for one Jack-o-Lantern and one pumpkin pie, I'll consider this pumpkin season a great success!
This year we planted pumpkin seeds. We don't eat a lot of pumpkin, either, but we could. I make a killer pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, and as the seedlings grew I started Pinteresting recipes for pumpkin soup and pumpkin coffeecake and mini pumpkin cheesecakes with gingersnap crusts (Are you kidding me? My mouth is watering just reading the name of the recipe!) no more canned pumpkin! No more shelling out $15 to make a Jack-o-Lantern! My imagination knew no limits!
The seeds sprouted, and grew well. They were transplanted, first to the green house, and then into the ground. Once in the ground, three of my four plants immediately died, leaving just one vine to provide the raw materials for all of my dreams. This vine grew, and grew, and grew. It covered the stepping stones to the green house. It invaded a bed of wild strawberries. It surrounded the asparagus box and is currently holding them hostage. I was intensely relieved that only one vine had survived. But guess what?
No pumpkins.
I wasn't going to suffer this silently. With visions of last year's squashless vine dancing before my eyes, I immediately started googling (How did people garden before Google?), and quickly found the problem.
Pumpkins need sex.
Who knew? Apparantly there are girl flowers and boy flowers, and if the bees aren't getting the pollen from the boys to the girls, no pumpkins. Luckily, humans can do this job as well as bees.
This is a boy flower. In the middle you see what vaguely resembles a penis. There were no girl flowers on my vine to photograph, but they (obviously) have no penis. What they do have is a tiny little green pumpkin at the base of the flower. If not fertilized, this little pumpkin falls off. The bees didn't seem to be doing their job fertilizing, so I entered the picture. Several times during the month of July I approached the male flowers with determination, broke off their penises (ouch!) took them to the girls, and performed pumpkin sex.
Now I don't really know the correct method for pumpkin sex, I was winging it. But I must have been doing something right (or it was the bees, after all) because now I have a few pumpkins. One of them is even turning orange!
The sight of these pumpkins on my vine fills me with joy! And even if I only get enough pumpkins for one Jack-o-Lantern and one pumpkin pie, I'll consider this pumpkin season a great success!
