Let’s talk tomato pollination! This one’s “old hat” for a lot of folks, but we’re surprised how many people don’t know about this.
Tomatoes are monoecious, meaning that each plant has the male and female flowers on every plant. What’s unique about tomatoes is that the male and female bits are located on each and every flower. This makes the plant “self-fertile,” which allows each flower to pollinate itself.
With outdoor tomatoes, this pollination usually occurs via pollinators and sometimes even by the wind. However, in a greenhouse, this often doesn’t happen. So, we have to help our tomatoes along.
The easiest way to initiate pollination is to gently tickle the flowers with your fingers. It’s a good idea to do this, typically once every few days. As each flower produces pollen, this process will knock that pollen into the right place and a tomato will set. This process will ensure pollination and you will get a tomato on each and every flower.
This process is also true for peppers, so you can also use this technique on your pepper plants. Sometimes you can just gently shake the plant and it’ll do the same thing, the point is to get the flowers to move and vibrate a bit. It can even help with outdoor plant pollination, too, and that way you don’t have to be concerned whether pollinators are visiting your plants or not.
There are gizmos out there that do this kind of thing. Some people even use an electric toothbrush to vibrate the plant. In our opinion, this is a total waste of money as your fingers will do just fine!
As for a cool fact about this? Wild tomatoes originally didn’t have this self-fertility trait. As wild tomatoes were domesticated, the tomatoes were obviously moved to new locations. But, the pollinators didn’t “get the memo” and thus didn’t follow the plants. So, breeding was done to maximize this self-fertility trait. To the point where all modern tomatoes now have this capability.
This trick certainly doesn’t work for all flower pollination. Many monecious plants have separate male and female flowers (e.g. squash, melon, many cucumber varieties, etc.) and thus pollen has to move from the male flower to the female flower. We’ll be showing this process soon as we have to do it this year.
So, if you’re getting flowers, but not tomatoes, this is the thing you need to do. If you’re not getting flowers, that’s an entirely different problem. It’s somewhat rare, but some tomato varieties will just not put on flowers with the low temperatures we get in the north!
