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Naturen,
You are exactly right. They aren't getting pollinated.
That is why there is a specific time to plan them.
There are you tube videos of pollinating pumpkins, this is a common
problem. Bees are dying and not pollinating the way they used to.
My girlfriend looked up the You Tube video and did exactly what the guy
in the video said, and she had gorgeous big pumpkins.
By the way, potting soil is for pots. Don't grow pumpkins in pots, it's no fun.
I planted pumpkin seeds last may (may 19th) & the vines today are long but the bees are not doing their jobs (not pollinating) It looks like another bust this yr. This would be the 3rd yr straight with no luck but maybe im not watering enough. I know that pumpkin vines need a lot of water. It has so far been a hot summer here.
Same for me too! Don't understand why, but the darn things are hard to grow. And they tease you too! I had like a 20 foot vine and got ONE diddly pumpkin out of it that rotted before I could even pick it.
I think I'd have better luck just throwing my store bought pumpkin that I bought this year into the ditch across the street after it's done for the year and let the seeds from it just fall where they may and see if anything grows, lol! At a local park where I live, somebody threw an old pumpkin into a field and that next year, there were like 2 or 3 vines with pumpkins on them. I picked one and took it home. When I saw that, I thought, damn, here I am putting all this hard work into trying to grow TWO friggin pumpkin vines and somebody just throws their old pumpkin out into a field and there's vines everywhere! What's wrong with this picture? LOL.
That's how I get my pumpkins! Find one of the kind you want to grow and leave it to rot, without carving it, on the spot where you want to have vines. In spring you will have at least 4 or 5 vines.
There are "girl" blooms and "boy" blooms - look inside the blossoms and you can tell the anatomy. Pumpkins produce many more boy blooms on long stalks. I had trouble growing pumpkins until a friend of mine showed me how to manually pollinate them. There just werent enough bees around, so we took a clean paint brush, brushed inside the boy blossom and then took the pollen and brushed inside the girl blossom. Voila, I had pumpkins that year! If you are unsuccessful with growing pumpkins, you may need to do the same. Like I said, there are many more boy blossoms than girl blossoms, and the girl blossoms are only open for a day or so, so you have to time it right. I check my vines almost daily looking for girl blossoms and when they are ready to open up I am ready with my clean paintbrush! I grew Big Max last year from edenbrothers.com and was successful, as well as a few other varieties that I bought at a local farm and had saved the seeds - NC Giant, and Yellow of Paris.
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