OK, let’s talk about pollinating by hand, advanced edition! This one will help you greenhouse growers and folks that don’t get visited by a lot of pollinators.
First off, some plants require pollination to set fruit. We talked about tomatoes and peppers the other day, those are super simple to pollinate by hand. But, some monoecious plants require pollen to travel from a male flower to a female flower. The really popular ones in the gardener’s wheelhouse are squash, melons and some types of cucumbers. There’s also diecious plants, which means the species has separate male and female plants entirely. Again with pollen having to travel from the male plant to the female plant.
This job is most often performed by pollinators, but northern gardens often have less pollinators or you might be growing in a greenhouse or hoop house that prevents pollinator access! So, we can perform this process by hand to aid in the pollination and greatly increase our harvest rates.
Female flowers will often have a very small version of the fruit attached to the base of the flower. Typically it looks like a small globe for a melon, but sometimes it’s a tiny version of a squash. The male flowers will not have this tiny fruit. So, that’s how we know the difference between the two!
Our preferred tool for the job are makeup grade q-tips. While regular q-tips will absolutely work, we find the fine tip and “less hairy” tips of makeup grade q-tips to be an advantage in hand pollination. But, if all you’ve got are the regular bathroom variety, that’ll do!
The basic gist of the process is to gently rub the stamen of the male flowers with the tip of the q-tip, then visit the pistils of female flowers with the tip of the q-tip. You should be able to observe light orange colored “stuff” on the q-tip after touching the male flowers. This is pollen and it’s what we’re trying to get between the flowers.
We usually visit several male flowers before visiting the female flower. This gets the tip nice and coated with pollen, which increases your chances of successfully pollinating the female flower. Feel free to pretend you’re a bee and visiting those nice looking flowers. If it helps you, feel free to make “bzzz”ing noises while you do it! You can perform the process several times in one sitting and it’s usually good to perform the process every few days as new flowers develop on your plants over the season. If a flower is “spent” (either male or female), there’s no use in visiting it.
If you’ve been successful with pollination, you’ll notice the “small fruit” on the female flower start to grow after several days. There’s no need for further pollination once you see this happen. If the “small fruit” shrivels up and dies off, then you were not successful with pollination. You do get fairly quick feedback on your process, so you’ll know fairly quickly whether you’re doing it right.
As you might imagine, it’s important to be fairly gentle in this process. You can damage the pistils and flower if you’re not careful, but you’ll likely be surprised at how robust flowers can be. At the same time, don’t feel like you have to be so gentle that you’re not picking up or distributing pollen. Remember, there’s big old chonky bumblebees out there and they aren’t exactly graceful. Also, it doesn’t take much pollen to be successful, just a little bit will do the job.
A lot of gardeners avoid plants that require this process entirely and we certainly understand that logic. It’s not the easiest of garden tasks and can be a bit nerve wracking your first few times. But, if you really want to stretch your growing skillsets, it’s an excellent skill to develop. Being able to pollinate by hand opens up a world of plants that might not otherwise be available and regardless of what it is, the basic process is the same.
