At last, several thousand words

There she is. That's the South Pumpkin, which is also a little bit uphill from the other. It's doing a good bit better than the downhill pumpkin, which had a tough time getting over the stress of the transplant to outside. But this guy is really taking off now. It's important to notice all the branches, because those branches allow the vine to quickly produce a lot more new leaves, which will lead to faster growth.



This is a female flower. Right below the little green bud, you can see a little green ball, which is about the size of a large pea. That's an actual pumpkin. Now, it will only start to grow and develop if the flower on top of it gets pollinated, which we won't do for at least a week or two yet. As long as we can, we'll keep the vine growing and adding new leaves so that we'll be able to produce the biggest pumpkin possible.




That big yellow bloom is a male flower. This picture was taken a week or two ago. At the moment, there aren't any blossoms open because we've been plucking all the male flowers off. When we're ready, we'll use a paint brush to collect pollen from the inside of that male flower and we'll place it in the female flower. If we're lucky, that pollen will fertilize the pumpkin and we'll get that little guy developing. We won't put all our eggs in one basket, though - we'll fertilize a number of flowers to make sure we get the right one.



This is a view from down inside the vine. It kinda reminded me of "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" so I wanted to share it with you.

XOXO,
Bert