5 Reasons Why Your Pumpkin Isn’t Producing Fruit

06.06.2023 - 17:42 / gardenerspath.com / Laura Ojeda Melchor / Winter Squash

There’s nothing more frustrating than watching your beautiful pumpkin plant produce gorgeous flowers but no plump orange gourds. Over and over, they flower with nothing to show for their work.

You want them to be ready in time for Halloween, or maybe for a fun dinner party where all your guests pick their own homegrown pumpkins to take home with them.

So what’s going on? How can you encourage your plants to produce fruit?

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In this article, I’ll reveal the top 5 reasons why your pumpkin isn’t producing fruit — and how to fix them.

The most likely reason why your healthy vines aren’t producing fruit is that the female flowers aren’t being pollinated.

So let’s talk about the birds and the bees of the pumpkin world for a second.

The very first flowers you see on the vine will be male.

These lack an ovary, which female flowers have: a clearly visible bump or nodule behind the petals.

Male flowers, called staminate flowers, begin to bloom about 55 days into a pumpkin’s overall growing cycle, and they’ll be the only flowers you see for one to two weeks.

This is because the male flowers are there to basically yell out to the bees in the area that there’s pollen and nectar for the taking.

That way, when the female – or pistillate – flowers bloom, the bees will already know where to get their food.

They’ll transfer pollen from the male flowers’ stamens to the female flowers’ stigmas, resulting in the ovary at the base of the female flower growing into a nice, fat pumpkin.

Both male and female flowers open at dawn and close by the end of the day. The window for