SEX! Yes, you read that right. So far, Amateur Idiot Gardner has been rambling, bumbling entries about how I blunder about my garden, attempting not to kill everything I try to grow. But I thought to myself, I want more pageviews, I want more hits. How to achieve this? I pondered for a bit. I drank some coffee. Ate a piece of cake. Pumpkin cake, as it goes. I looked at the cake more closely. It seemed to be trying to tell me something. No, not 'you're getting fat' (though if it had it would've been a fair cop) - it was the pumpkin element. 'I'm growing - ahem, attempting to grow pumpkins' my one and only braincell thought as it feebly fired a few neurons through my noggin. 'Pumpkins . . they're flowering. Both male and female.' Then it came to me - 'sex sells!'

Well, what works for soap operas, the adult movie sector and those adverts for Cabbury's Caramel featuring that disarmngly seductive rabbit might work for my blog, I thought. So here we go. The sex life of pumpkins. Corrr! It goes something like this. No, it's not 'a daddy pumpkin and a mummy pumpkin have a soecial kind of cuddle and nine months later along comes a baby pumpkin'. Nor is a pumpkin stork involved. So clear your head of those notions. Okay? Okay. What pumpkins do is produce separate male and female flowers, in common with many other plants - for example, the squash family. Other plants do things differently - obviously the plant world is less hung up with gender issues than we humans. Tomatoes, for example, like so many other plants produce flowers that have both male and female reproductive parts.

Not so pumpkins. When the vines are large and mature enough they start putting out large flowers, on long stalks that project them up above the leaves of the plants. However, at this stage no female flowers are produced. This occurs a little later and by now the bees and other pollinating insects are well used to visiting the pumpkin plants. This is vital as without the busy little visitors to the garden, you'd be wasting your time trying to grow anything. Basically the insects visit male flowers, pick up pollen and may visit a female flower before heading back to their hives or wherever. This pollinates the female flower#and voila. That's it. No wining and dining. No chocolates. No Barry White music. Just a busy bee and a quick rub against its legs.

At the top of this article is a picture of a tiny baby pumpkin with its withered flower still attached. Here's a couple more shots. It's easy to tell the female flowers apart from the males - they have tiny fruit ready and waiting to swell and grow upon pollination. I've put my fingers behind one of the mini pumpkins for scale. If the flower has been properly pollinated, the bloom will die and drop off and the burgeoning fruit will grow. If not, it'll wither itself and go to pumpkin heaven. You can pollinate manually as it were, using a soft brush to gently transfer pollen between the flowers. So far, though, I've not needed to do this as my volunteer pollinators are quite efficient.

That's it. Once they're pollinated you can watch them grow and, already, my tiny first few pumpkins are growing at a fast rate. I'm feeding them weekly and giving them plenty of water and, this being North Carolina, they're certainly receiving plenty of sun. Of all my crops, pumpkins are what excite me most and yes, it's childish and yes, I keep picturing Linus from Peanuts sitting in the pumpkin patch at Hallowe'en, eagerly awaiting the Great Pumpkin ('You bloackhead!') I hope I get a few decent ones, I will surely keep you posted. I hope you've enjoyed this edition on my blog detailing how pumpkins get it on. You may now uncover your children's eyes.

TTFN!

Left: A visitor to my garden.

Hello! The soggy weather has ended, leading into another hot spell. Today the heat index is pushing 100F. Muggy. (I do like that word . . it sounds exactly like the condition it describes.) I've planted broccoli and I hope the high heat tails off soon, broccoli likes cooler temperatures. We'll see. I have loads of tomato plants filled with large, ripening fruit. Can't wait, fresh home grown toms are brilliant. The pumpkin plants continue to grow like cousins of Little Shop of Horror's Audrey. Feed me!My last few butternut squashes are ripening nicely and the green beans and crookneck squash are slowly tailing off. The cucumbers, after a magnificent effort, are finishing too.

This is okay as I have Autumn crops in mind. Particularly carrots and beetroot, that won't mind the colder weather. I also intend to plant parsnips. Parsnips apparently actually improve after going through a few frosts and I love roast parsnip, delicious. I had trhought about potatoes, but nothing I am reading suggests they should be grown in Autumn, so I'm going to wait til February. I'm already thinking about next year, using the knowledge I've gained this year. What worked, what didn't work, what techniques were sound, how I can add more knowledge to my gardening know-how.

Not sure I will bother with corn next year. It takes space and I can, I think, make more use of that space. I'm going to enlarge the vegetable patch considerably next year and need to give more thought to what I want to grow and how much space to allocate to each thing. I'll also give thought to what complements other crops and crop rotation. One thing that will help a lot next year is that I will have lots of luvverly compost to use. Another bonus is I won't have to break my back digging out lawn - the extyension to the plot will be achieved by simply covering grass with tarpaulin for a few months, killing the grass/weeds which then rot into the soil, fertilising it. The rest of the plot I'll keep weed free during winter, less work that way come spring.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Hi. Pictured to the left are things I picked this morning; various squashes and one cucumber. The cucumbers finally seem to be declining after an amazingly productive period. My green beans barely survived the hot, dry period but have now burst into full life once more and I'm getting a daily crop again. My chest freezer is rapidly filling up with frozen produce!

I've been preserving my crops by blanching and freezing. With green beans this involves top and tailing the bean pods (I pick them young before the beans have grown too much), snapping them in half and then boiling for three minutes. Immediately after taking them out of the boiling water I immerse them in iced water to stop the cooking process. Then I put them into ziplock bags and freeze. The process is the same with squash, you cut them into one inch pieces and put them through the same blanching procedure as the beans. Works pretty well I've found.

I am having a problem with squash bugs. They bore into your squashes and eat the flesh. I've read that looking out for egg clusters on leaves can help; if you knock them to the ground the local beetles think 'oh look! Brunch!' (I'm pretty sure beatles eat brunch). There's other solutions so I'll try a few. The bugs only really seem to like the spaghetti squash . . one of two crookneck squashes have been affected but that's all. The butternuts have, so far, been left alone. I want to find the most effective methods before my pumpkins begin to flower and fruit. Speaking of which, here's a photo of one of my vines growing at an almost frightening rate. Honestly, it's like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. All the wet weather has given the young plants all the impetus they need and the vines are barrelling along. I'm going to enjoy waiting for the Great Pumpkin to show up at Hallowe'en!

Left, a monarch butterfly in the garden.

Hi.

The heavy rain has continued. We've had at least 5 inches this week on top of all we had the week before. This presents problems of course. The fact I planted a lot of stuff in raised beds has helped a bit as the plants themselves haven't been drowned. The pumpkin seedlings in their hills seem to have actually done very well. My various squash plants have gone berserk and the vegetable patch now resmbles something out of a plant-based 50s B movie. 'The Sensational Sinister Squash Plant' maybe? Some of the young fruits have, unfortunately, rotted and the growth of the fruits has become a little stunted as we have had day after day of rain and little sun.

We've now got a few days (at least) break in the weather and I expect the garden to go BOOM. The cucumbers continue to produce, my bean bushes are still yielding green beans (but in dwindling numbers and size) so we're not doing too badly. My tomatoes have been a challenge, though. The constant heavy rain has made the ground so sodden that, even with stakes, the plants all keep flopping over. I've therefore given them bigger stakes driven in deeper to the ground and this has helped a lot. There's a lot of fruit coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to it, I love fresh tomatoes. I also love the smell of the plants.

That's it for now, take care!