Down by the banks...

...of hanky panky where the butternut hangs all swanky-swanky.

Yeah. So I've been having loads of hanky-panky with my butternut flowers, delicately taking the yellow powder from the stamen of the male flowers and transferring it to the pistil of the female flowers with a small paint brush. Ideally, these fancy terms I'm throwing out here are the correct names of the the parts I'm doinking on a daily basis.

It's cool though--the female flowers that I am not able to 'pollinate' shrivel and drop off but the ones that are fertilized are plumping up like a round pregnant belly.