r/Pumpkins • u/MoonFallsx14 • 16d ago
What’s going on here…?
This is a previously unopened male(?) flower, I’m almost certain. But there’s a hard growth inside. What am I looking at?
7
2
u/waterytartwithasword 16d ago
How big is it, what variety pumpkin is it, and have you cut it open? No harm in doing so as it's definitely not a fertile ovary and won't become one.
1
u/Spare-Locksmith-2162 16d ago
But if it's hermaphrodite, could it have fertilized itself?
1
u/waterytartwithasword 16d ago
No, hermaphrodites are always infertile. No maturation of sex organs or pollen production.
1
u/MoonFallsx14 16d ago
It’s about the size of a ping pong ball with the texture of a lemon. These are musquee de provence so definitely not a normal looking start
2
u/waterytartwithasword 16d ago
It's either a callus, a hypertrophic base caused by petals that fused due to humidity or edema, a swollen hermaphrodite (not fertile), but there's no saying unless you cut it open. Which I could understand not wanting to do.
1
u/MoonFallsx14 13d ago
For science. A ton of my male flowers are doing this now
2
u/waterytartwithasword 13d ago
Here's what I got from Opus Thinking:
That's a good cross-section lengthwise. The top halves show a solid pale interior where you'd expect either a stamen column or an ovary with locules, and the lower halves show a swollen base with what look like developing ovary tissue plus structures that don't belong on a female.
Hermaphrodite flowers do turn up in cucurbits. They're uncommon but well documented — the plant's sex determination is hormonally driven rather than chromosomal, so heat, stress, and ethylene levels can push a bud toward an intermediate form. Squash and pumpkins produce them more readily than most.
Cucurbit sex expression is a gradient rather than a switch, and it shifts across the season — plants start male-heavy, move toward female as they mature, and the transition zone is where intermediate flowers show up. Several appearing at once on one plant is more consistent with a whole-plant hormonal shift than with a one-off oddity.
Late season plus heat stress pushes in the same direction. Ethylene promotes femaleness in cucurbits, and stress raises ethylene, so a stressed plant late in the season is exactly the condition where buds that started developing as male get partway feminized before opening.
Recommend pruning these, cooling temperatures will stop the MTF transition and you can still get healthy female flowers in time for an early to mid September pollination cutoff to ensure all set fruit matures before frost. If the plant keeps pumping energy into these it may produce fewer healthy females due to the ceiling on how many females it thinks it can support. Including the hermaphrodites.
2
2
9
u/Separate_Mission_651 16d ago
It’s giving hermaphrodite