If they had already bloomed, maybe they weren't fertilized... Some of my squash plants have pretty bad timing when it comes to having male and female flowers blooming at the same time... The plant will sometimes abort them if it is already supporting a large fruit. Young or stunted plants will also do it... When my spaghetti squash was still small, it was aborting the female flowers when they were still tiny. It grew larger and I have a couple of fruits now.

Hi there, as I understand it pumpkin vines reroot so probably a bad idea to keep the vine off the ground.
Also, are you certain that they are female flowers that are falling off? I found a site called allaboutpumpkins.com that says not to be alarmed if the first flowers fall off because they are male flowers that only bloom to establish bees coming into the garden.

This post was edited by StephanieHS on Thu, Jun 19, 14 at 17:20

The plant ususally knows if it can support fruit.. The abundance of healthy leaves is important.. The spaghetti squash I mentioned, didn't start "keeping" fruits until the vine was eight feet long. It didn't develop abundant foliage until then. Some other squash, like the kabocha cultivar I'm growing, start developing fruit right away but I noticed these developed a bunch of leaves from the start too. Speaking of leaves, do they look kealthy...? I'm wondering if your pumpkin needs to be fed. I'm not a fertilizing expert though.

Here is a couple pictures i just took today of them, the longest one with a male flower in bloom on it seems to look healthy (although with this being my first time growing pumpkin i dont really know for sure), its the longest out of the three, and the other picture shows my two pumpkin vines that ive noticed are yellowing in the leaves, unfortunately i have them planted right next to eachother because i ran out of room in my garden to separate them and have a suitable place for the one i would move. They all had what looked like rot at the base stem of the vine, so i buried the part of the stem that had rot all the way up to where the rot ended and the healthy stem began, which seemed to help because they grew considerably right after i did that, but i dont know if maybe that could be to blame as well.

This post was edited by MissKayle10-3-13 on Mon, Jun 23, 14 at 12:10

Here is the second picture i mentioned, it wouldnt let me load more than one at a time.

They look healthy but they still look kind of young. I usually don't get fruit until about where the plant in the first pic ends and usually after the vine grows a foot or two past that. I hope that makes sense... Nothing wrong with using milk crates to prop fruites.

Double post

This post was edited by mav72 on Mon, Jun 23, 14 at 15:57

Hi, I agree with mav72 that seem a bit young and not yet cause for worry. Is the first plant in a pot? It may need fertilizer. Also, I'm curious about the rot you described. You don't happen to have a pic of that do you?

These two are the best pics that i could find, i didnt take pics of the rot directly but i found some pics that i took of the pumpkin plants early on before i buried the stems that looked the worst, i wasnt sure if it was rot or something else though, but i can describe it as looking as though the main stem at the very base began to look almost dried out and became almost ribbon like, i hope the pics are clear enough to discribe it a little better.

Here is the second picture, i circled the stem that is the furthest back behind everything else.

hmm, those vines don't look so hot in the picture but I have no idea what the reason might be. I hope someone with more experience takes a look for you.

The reason I asked is because my first round of pumpkins were killed off by vine borers. The plants looked great but at the base of the plant they were whitish, but they had these noticeable holes in them and brown sawdusty stuff. Luckily this doesn't appear to be your problem.

Perhaps post these last 2 photos over on the forum for pests and diseases? There are some very knowledgeable gardeners that respond over there that might be able to help you!