I am an absolutely amateur gardener. I have my Vegepods and my perennials and am pretty successful. The bane of my existence has been pumpkins.

The first year I decided to try them, I had just enough success to feel proud and get hooked. The pumpkin plant variety I had was called Howden. They are the taller, skinnier kind. By sheer luck, we had two pumpkins that year and my husband carved them, we roasted the seeds and high-fived ourselves on Halloween.

Last year, Year 2, was utter failure. I had the Jack-o-Lantern variety, the squatter/fatter kind more associated with Halloween. All summer long, I watched male flower after male flower come and go. I never got a female flower, so never got a pumpkin.

This year the only variety I could find was Jack-o-Lantern again. For at least the last month, I’ve been doing daily pumpkin flower checks. At the start of August, I started to panic. No female flowers. What do I do? I tried cutting the vine back so less energy was spent sustaining the vine, my theory being there’d be more left over for a female flower. I saw a video that swore if you cut a few male flowers off, it helps. As a last ditch effort, even though I’d been using some general purpose fertilizer all summer, I happened to have a time-release fruit tree fertilizer spike in my garage (failed apple tree attempts, different story). I pressed one into the soil near the base of the plant.

On Tuesday this week, I went for my daily pumpkin check. Five flowers. Male, male, male, male,… FEMALE!

Here’s a male version for comparison:

I read that a pumpkin plant typically produces 10 males for 1 female. For me it’s been more like 100 to 1. Dutifully, not trusting the bees to do the work on my precious female flower, I pollinated it myself. I used a Q-tip to swipe up some pollen from the male flowers and did my best to transfer some to the female flower.

Assuming it takes, the internet tells me I’ll have a fully mature pumpkin in 45-55 days, plenty of time before Halloween. Dare I hope for a second female flower?

My little squash patch hasn’t produced much. One tiny jack-be-little before something pulled up the vine and no butternut squash at all. But this chance at a single jack-o-lantern pumpkin makes me insanely happy. Even if it doesn’t work out, I still find the vines pretty and a nice match to the black-eyed susans.