HI Terry, Great picture! Thanks for adding it! Carving or pie? :-) I didn't get any pumpkin in yet, I may still try one or 2 of the 'baby boo' for the kids for Halloween. I know a few years ago my gourds were not doing well, and hand pollinating was a little confusing at first, so I hope these pictures help some who are new at it. JoJo

momliz, it is hard to distinguish, but if you have a male tree and a female tree, the male will seem "fuller" because the blooms are a little bigger. I lost my male and did not save any seed when I had both. I would send a pic of my confirmed female, but the blooms are a week away here in PA.

It's normal for males to dominate before females start to bloom. Even then you will see pretty much one female to every ten males. To the poster who thinks his male flowers are dying off: all pumpkin flowers bloom for only a few hours every morning before they die off. As for not cutting the male flowers, I disagree. I've been growing pumpkins going on ten years now and if there are no female flowers to pollinate, then I will cut the male flowers just before they start to shrivel. I've yet to get a diseased plant doing this. I cut the male flowers because they are delicious to eat. So if you don't get pumpkins, you can enjoy cooking and eating the male flowers throughout the growing season. I cut off the stem, gently rinse them under cold water and saute them after dredging through a thin whole-wheat pancake batter - yum! BTW. I should mention that pumpkins are very difficult to hand pollinate. You'r e better off putting out bee loving flowers early in the season in order to get your location established on the honey bees routes. Ants do a pretty good job also, so if you see ants around your pumpkin vines, then do not try to exterminate them. If you do want to hand pollinate, then use a very soft artists brush and lightly stroke the pistol of a male plant (you should not see tons of pollen - in this case a little is too much), then lightly stroke the stamen of the female plant (again a little is too much). Even then you are not likely to succeed with hand pollination.

I don't know if it will work for you or not, but there were no usable male flowers open when my last female flower opened. I took one of the closed male flowers that were starting to "ripen" and getting ready to open and peeled the flower petals off of it. I rubbed it with my finger to be safe and some pollen came off even though it was not yet open. The best thing I can say to do if you're worried about it, is to just test it. Worse comes to worse you cut a male flower for nothing. Oh well, there will be more later. Or, if you don't want to do that, you can wait. Everyone else is right, there will be plenty of male and female flowers later. My watermelon plant did that. My female flowers opened first and started dying off. I know, it's odd and I couldn't figure out why. Anyways, the male flowers came a bit after that and I had lots of personal sized watermelon. Good luck to you and keep up hope!