Pollination
Pollination is one of the most critical components of a successful garden harvest. Without pollination, you won’t have vegetables to eat. The trouble, though, is pollination isn’t always guaranteed. Sometimes it’s poor, but there are ways to improve it to help ensure a bountiful yield.
What Is Pollination, and Why Is it Important?
Vegetable plants reproduce through pollination, creating seeds surrounded by the fruit we eat. This fertile offspring helps carry genetic information to the next generation of plants.
For pollination to occur, pollen must be moved from the male to the female flowers. When done correctly, it triggers fruit production. When a female flower doesn’t get completely pollinated, the plant aborts the fruit that the flower was destined to produce and channels energy into making others.
Signs of poor pollination
For most plants, poor pollination results in a reduced number of fruits or no fruit. But sometimes, it results in incomplete pollination where not all ovules are pollinated, so the resulting fruit is deformed or drops off the plant early.
What Leads to Poor Pollination?
There are numerous causes of poor or incomplete pollination:
- A lack of bees in your garden is one of the most common reasons. Bees are the primary pollinator of vegetable crops, but they need more than just veggie plants to survive.
- Poor pollination can also result if the female flowers bloom on cooler, rainy days.
- Plants could be spaced too far apart for bees to pollinate them effectively.
- Something happened in your plant that reduced or halted flower production. Drought stress, over-fertilization, pest problems, and disease can trigger fewer flowers.
- You may have an insufficient number of plants. If your vegetable needs another plant for cross-pollination, you must have at least a second plant of that same variety.
Ways to Improve Pollination
There are many ways to encourage pollination in your garden and, in turn, improve yields:
- Add clumps of brightly colored, successively blooming flowers to the garden and your lawn to draw in pollinators.
- Make sure you plant tomatoes where they can get a gentle breeze.
- Give plants a helping hand, moving pollen from flower to flower.
- Do not over-fertilize your plants. An abundance of nitrogen encourages vegetative growth instead of flower development.
- Use lawn and garden chemicals that aren’t harmful to bees, and spray during the day when bees aren’t active.
- Be mindful of your watering schedule. Bees are more active early in the morning and just before dusk. Water when they are less busy, so they don’t come across flowers filled with water.
How to Manually Pollinate Flowers
Hand pollinating flowers is as simple as moving pollen from male to female parts. The challenge is determining which parts are which.
On dioecious plants with separate male and female flowers, you’ll need to work with one of each.
- Strip the petals off a male flower, exposing the stamens and pollen.
- Transfer pollen on your finger or a small paintbrush to a female flower, rubbing it onto the center of the stigma.
Monoecious plants have male and female anatomy within one flower and typically don’t need manual pollination. To improve pollination, shake the plant gently to dislodge pollen from the stamens, so it settles onto the stigma.
