Hand pollinating

With the temps already in the high 90's and breaking 100 yesterday, I have been getting out early mornings to hand pollinate.
Anyone else doing this? I use half of a Q-tip swab and scrape some pollen from the male flowers and push it into the center of the stamen on the female flowers. You know pretty quickly if it has taken. The fruit nearly doubles in size after a day.

I've been doing this two for some volunteer squash that came up near my compost pile. The squashes I planted myself are nowhere near flowering yet.

Maybe they would get pollinated either way, but I hate to see female flowers shrivel and fall off if they don't get pollinated, so I just pollinate them every time I see a female.

I do it just like you, except I skip the Q-tip and just pick a male flower, strip the petals, and use the male flower to pollinate the female flower. I tend to just do it whenever I am walking by, and I don't tend to carry Q-tips in my pockets. Nice photos, btw!

I do it (when I remember) earlier in the year for my apricot . It flowers in February before there are many insects around and (normally) is protected by the polytunnel, so those that are may not find it very easily. I'm not sure yet how much difference it makes, but the year I did this regularly it did fruit better than the next year, when I almost forgot. I've used soft paint brushes, and little bits of sheep fleece as pollen transfer media.

For me, with a pretty small garden, I just keep a bottle with Q-tips inside the garden cage. It was an interesting dilemma for me on how to do the manual pollination. I've thought about doing it by picking the male flowers, but this is the desert, and the bees and other critters need that flower, so picking them wasn't optimal (even though I have a recipe for fried squash blossoms). I just needed to make sure I get squash!

Nancy, I see you are on Skye. I have some FB friends there. One of my fellow knife makers, Jake Cleland of Skye knives. Check his work out. He's an amazing artisan! Nice seeing the different pollination media and those apricots are looking good.

https://www.skyeknives.com/

I have to hand-pollinate my limequat and my Meyer lemon in the winter when they come inside to live with us. They are both ever-bearing, and so we use the paintbrushes my daughter has in her paint sets to do the job. She always gets a kick out of being a real pollinator.

And we all three always love the incredible scent of citrus blossoms mixed with the scent of our Christmas tree, all in our living room!

I never knew Meyer lemons were ever bearing.  I used to keep one on my balcony years ago when I had an apartment and would bring it in in the winter. I guess that explains why it felt like a seasonal bearer to me.  No pollination inside.

I do believe that other people have pollination problems.   Even in the community gardens around here some of them have resorted to adding a behive and flowers to feed them.  Around here it seems to happen when are surrounded by lawn.  The community garden with the behive is in the middle of a community park that mostly looks like a soccer field.  

I have a yard overrun with weeds in addition to my ever expanding flowers and as often as not half my vegetables are planted in the flower beds.  Only problem I have with this is that the wasps only play nice with me.  There was one afternoon when I counted the different species of pollinators in about a meter of space in the yard and between different bees; wasps, hoverflies; butterflies, and some small beetles stopped somewhere over a dozen.

As much people around here like to plant coneflower and black eyed Susan and other large showy flowers for the pollinators, I think they like the dainty little that bloom in mass best.  Herbs, anything related to parsley, sunflowers, and anything in the cabbage family are all good for this.  I think the cabbages and most of the parsley are early spring bloomers.  In the herbs Rosemary actually blooms during the winter.

I don't use a greenhouse here, but maybe overwintering a few of these could start drawing the pollinators in before your warm season crops need them.

Joshua, that is an excellent point about leaving the male flowers for the bees, etc. We are not in the desert, and have so many wildflowers blooming everywhere right now, but yeah, in that situation I wouldn't be picking flowers either. I picked a male flower this morning that had two little unidentified bugs climbing around in the pollen, and when I took it over to the female flower there was another one in there. So I am guessing I can probably take a break from hand-pollinating and let the bugs take care of it.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:I have to hand-pollinate my limequat and my Meyer lemon in the winter when they come inside to live with us. They are both ever-bearing, and so we use the paintbrushes my daughter has in her paint sets to do the job. She always gets a kick out of being a real pollinator.

And we all three always love the incredible scent of citrus blossoms mixed with the scent of our Christmas tree, all in our living room!

Can you tell me how you take care of your citrus that you bring inside in winter? I'm in Texas and it gets too cold here to have citrus outside in the winter, which is new for me, since I spent the last 20 years in a tropical climate.

How big of a pot do you use, how do you maintain fertility in the pot, and do you use grow lights in the winter?

The idea of getting some citrus in the winter, or even just sweet-smelling blossoms, is very interesting to me, if it's not too involved! My kids would love that too. We grew lots of citrus at my old home, and the smell of the blossoms was just the best!