My first-ever successful pumpkin in the garden after so many failed ones. This is bees pollination and only a few are present so I did try to do hand pollination to produce more fruits.
Greetings garden lovers,
I hope that everyone is happy and well. It's almost 4 am here and as part of my daily routine In my working days this time, I should still be awake for my graveyard shift I did start to sleep but I was woken up. Now even though it's my rest day but I haven't gone home because I thought that we have work later but then it was canceled. My eyes seem to be used to being awake at this time so I thought about doing some content and sharing it with you on one of my experiments when I got home a week ago.
Many times, I've been left out of most of our garden updates. So now this is how I hand-pollinate my squash. For so long that I've been waiting for its fruit to succeed but every time it gets big it turns yellow and then it fell to the ground so I tried a way that I see how my grandfather did to his squash plant before. But first, to those who still don't know what female and male squash flowers look like, this is how it looks.
Male squash
Male flowers have long narrow stems. Then you can also identify it with its reproductive organ in the center of the flower.
female squash
Female flowers will always have tiny fruits under the flower and you can also see it through their reproductive organ.
And that's it because there were a few times when I thought the fruiting of squash would be successful but it wasn't, so I tried it. When I came home for a week, I looked for male flowers to pollinate the female flowers and observe since I think there were only a few bees in the garden to pollinate them.
This is the procedure. Because the female flower is difficult to open, I just took half of its petals. And for male flowers, I didn't use a brush and just picked the entire flower and removed the petals, and just inserted the male into the female flowers.
After being away for one week I immediately check my experiment in the garden last week and this is how the squash is now. Before it was gliding on my eggplant stems now it went down because it's become heavy. It's still young and you see that it was green lying on the ground so decided to put some banana leaves at least it would not lay directly on the ground which might affect its growth. So let's see how it goes after it gets matured.
After I saw the very good results of my pumpkin, I saw a female pumpkin again and so I repeated the process. Even though I'm not home this week, I will say hello to my hubby and ask him if my pollination was successful again and how the old ones go now.
I will update you about this and thank you so much for taking the time to read. So if you have any complement how to do this please feel free to share them in my comment below. HAVE A GREAT DAY AND KEEP PLANTING garden lovers🧡💛💚.