We’ve been talking about some heavy and advanced stuff lately, so let’s get back to the basics! Today, let’s dive into how tomatoes make tomatoes!
Most fruiting plants, including tomatoes, require a process called pollination to occur in order to produce a fruit. The short story is that the plants have male bits and female bits. And, well, this is the literal origin of the “birds and the bees” story that we all know.
In some fruiting plants, such as most cucumbers and squash, those male and female parts are on different flowers and pollen must travel between the flowers to achieve successful pollination. This role is typically performed by pollinators, like bees. But, in plants like tomatoes, the flowers have both male and female parts in each flower. Meaning, the pollen only has to travel within each flower to achieve pollination. Sometimes people call this “self-pollinating.”
If you’re growing tomatoes outdoors, the gardener often has to do nothing to pollinate the flowers. Pollinators can knock the pollen around easy enough, but even a light gust of wind can successfully pollinate a tomato.
But, when you grow tomatoes in the north, we’re often using greenhouses that prevents access to pollinators. In this case, the gardener should regularly pollinate the tomato flowers by hand. Fortunately, this is quite simple! Just give those flowers a brief and gentle tickle. Sometimes you’ll even see a plume of pollen release! When you do this, you’ll virtually guarantee tomato development on that flower.
We’ve heard stories of growers that “fixed” their greenhouse flooring and then suddenly stopped getting tomatoes. It’s because just walking on a bouncy floor was enough to pollinate those tomatoes!
The amount of time between successful pollination and when you’ll begin seeing a tomato varies based on the variety. It can be a few days to a couple of weeks. You can tell a tomato has been pollinated because it will dry up a bit and eventually fall off the plant. But, be assured, if that pollen gets knocked around, you’ll have a tomato!
Regardless of how you grow tomatoes, this process can and will speed up the pollination process. As for frequency, we typically do this at least every few days, or whenever we’re visiting our tomato plants. Pollen gets produced at different times on the flowers, so performing this over time is the way to go. Oh, and you do want to be gentle as knocking the flower off prematurely can prevent a tomato from growing at the site.
We’ll have more to add on this topic as pollination can be a challenge for northern growers! We simply have less pollinators, so aiding our plants with their natural processes is a helpful thing to do!
