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!