How to Pollinate a Pumpkin Plant

Birds do it and bees do it -- but bees also help all kinds of plants do it too. If bees are scarce in your neighborhood, whether honeybees or native bees, plant pollination will be incomplete. That means problems in the vegetable garden, including poor fruit set -- low overall production -- and poorly formed fruits because of incomplete flower pollination. Avoiding pesticides and herbicides to create a bee-friendly garden and creating habitat for native bees is the longer-term solution. But if you have few bees, the only way to grow good pumpkins is by hand pollination.

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Instructions

- 1
  Inspect the pumpkin vine to make sure it is producing female flowers, or those with immature or rudimentary fruit beneath the flower petals. Pumpkin vines will produce many male flowers before the female flowers begin to develop to make sure pollen is readily available for fertilization.
- 2
  Break off a mature male flower -- one with abundant pollen that comes off on your hand when you touch its stamen or pollen-bearing structure. Cut the male flower's petals off so the stamen is open to the air.
- 3
  Find a freshly opened female flower. Female flowers are receptive to fertilization for only one day, so it's important that the flower is fresh or newly opened.
- 4
  Roll the male flower's pollen onto the female flower's stigma, in the center part of the flower, making sure that pollen covers all stigma sections.

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