How to Hand-Pollinate Your Vegetables

In our butterfly garden, I always let nature take its course. Native plants are strong and self-sufficient, and the butterflies always found the right plant on which to lay their eggs. I expected the vegetable garden to be equally independent once I gave the seeds a good start, adequate water, fertile soil, and mulch. I was partially correct, because the plants have grown big and healthy without any gardener intervention. The exceptions have been the squash and zucchini plants which cannot survive the squash vine borers on their own, and the cowpeas which need help to survive the aphids.

What I didn't realize about vegetable plants, however, is that a vigorous plant does not necessarily equate with an abundant harvest. My watermelon plants are a perfect example, with long vines spreading through the garden, lots of flowers every day, and not a single fruit. The squash plants, too, produced lots of blooms without anything edible in sight. And so I learned that nature sometimes needs some help in the vegetable garden, at least when it comes to pollination.

There are two types of plants -- those that produce male and female blossoms, and those that only produce one type of flower. The former include plants such as zucchini and squash, cucumber, and watermelon. In the latter category are eggplant and bean. These are called "perfect", "bisexual" or "complete" flowers because everything is contained within each bloom. Hand-pollinating is not difficult for either type of plant, but the approach is different.

When a plant produces both male and female flowers, the key is to find the females so that they can be pollinated. The female blooms have an immature vegetable just under the flower, so if you look closely you will see a miniature squash, melon or cucumber. This is the easiest way to be sure you have a female flower. The centers of the flowers are also different, so with larger flowers such as squash, you can quickly distinguish between male and female by looking into the flower. This is not easy with a tiny flower like those on cucumbers and melons, so stick with looking for the baby underneath.

I have yet to discover a female without many males nearby, so if you are lucky enough to find the female flower, the hard work is over. Once you've located the female, remove a nearby male flower. Carefully peel off the petals, leaving only the stamen which is covered in yellow pollen. Take this stamen and rub it all over the pistil of the female flower. When I want to be extra sure of success, I remove a second male flower and repeat the process. I try to remember where the female flowers I've pollinated are located so I can check back the next day. If the flower is still open (which it usually isn't), I pollinate again.

With plants that have "perfect" flowers, the process of hand-pollinating is even easier. No need to remove any blooms from the plant. In fact, each flower is a potential future vegetable, so you want to keep as many as possible on the plant. For these flowers, I use a make-up brush. I've read that others use a small paint brush or Q-tip, but I love my retired eye shadow applicator. Whichever implement you choose, just take the brush and gently rub the pollen from the stamen (these are the pollen-covered filaments that surround the center) onto the pistil. The pistil is the female center of the flower -- the tip is called the stigma -- and this is what you must pollinate. The flowers on these plants can stay open for several days, so it's not a bad idea to repeat the process every day or so. You will know the process has worked if the flower closes but doesn't fall off the plant. Expect a baby vegetable soon.

Hand-pollinating is one of the easiest garden projects around, and it's playing god on a very simple level. In just a few seconds, you can help your plants conceive. If you see your plant flowering without producing much, a failure to pollinate may be to blame. The solution is easy, with or without your Chanel makeup brush.

Giving the watermelons a helping hand

I found two female watermelon blossoms on our "Charleston Gray" plants right around the same time. I hand-pollinated both, and didn't think about them again for a few weeks. At first, I couldn't remember exactly where the female blossoms had been. I looked along the vine, and there was a BIG baby watermelon. I picked it up and it was incredibly dense, much heavier than I expected something that size to be. I soon found a second watermelon nearby, and it was even bigger.


Since then, I've discovered a third melon in the garden, and all three watermelons have grown incredibly fast. They're still growing rapidly, so the question is when to harvest for maximum flavor. Determining when a watermelon is ripe sounds challenging. Some books suggest the melon is ready to pick when the small tendril nearby turns brown and dry. Others suggest listening for a hollow sound when you thump the watermelon. I don't see any little tendrils near my watermelons, and I don't trust my sense of acoustics enough to accurately assess the sound of my melons. I'm going with the third approach, which is to watch the underside of the melon. When the bottoms change to a warm, creamy yellow, the melon is ready to harvest.

Right now, all three melons are bright white underneath. I try not to disturb them too often to peek at the bottoms, so I'm also gauging their size to determine maturity. Charleston Grays should reach between 28 and 35 pounds. Our biggest melon is close to 15 pounds right now, and the smaller two are probably around 10 pounds each. You wouldn't predict those weights from looking at the melons -- they are much heavier than their size suggests. This is our first experience growing watermelons, but they must lose that density as the melons approach maturity. I'm tempted to take our bathroom scale out into the garden to get an exact weight -- they are growing so fast, it would be interesting to take a daily reading -- but I doubt the melons will enjoy being moved onto a scale every day.

Melons should not be watered too much as they approach maturity or the flavor will diminish. We've had a few good rains this past week, so I'm not watering the plants at all. The leaves look green and healthy, and the vines are continuing to grow and sprawl through the garden. There are tiny new flowers every day, although so far I haven't discovered any new female blooms. Now that I know hand-pollination works well, I try to look every day so I won't miss an opportunity to help create another baby watermelon. I'm already planning dinner of watermelon salad with feta and mint, with a watermelon agua fresca to drink. The way the melons are growing, it should be any day now.

No luck growing watermelons

We planted "Charleston Gray" watermelon plants on April 1st. It's now the end of July, and we haven't produced a single mature fruit. The vines have stretched in all directions, around and over everything in site. The plants are lush and healthy, and constantly covered with tiny yellow flowers. Every so often they send out little tendrils looking for support. When they grab onto one of our other plants a little too vigorously, I cut off the tendril binding the two plants together.

So why so many flowers and no fruit? I suspect one of the problems is that most of those flowers are males, and the few females are not getting pollinated. The flowers are quite small, but today I bent down to study them and noticed a female flower clearly different from the others. Sure enough, just under the flower is a baby watermelon. I picked off two male flowers and used both to pollinate the female.

A few weeks ago, I was thrilled to find a small fruit hidden below some leaves. Although no bigger than my son's hand, it was a perfect miniature Charleston Gray watermelon. After the whole family admired our baby, I photographed it and put it back under the leaves where I found it. We had several days of very heavy rain, and when I next checked on the baby watermelon it was shriveled up and black. I'm guessing the rain and blossom-end rot are to blame, but I'm not really sure what happened.















I have read that pollination is often poor for all vegetables when the temperature is too high. We have hit 100 degrees just about every day since early June, so the weather may be in part to blame. The flowers are also quite small, and I rarely see bees or butterflies paying them any attention. They clearly prefer the big squash blossoms. Hand-pollinating has been very successful with our Benning's Green Tint plants, so I'm hoping for similar success with the watermelons.

We've had an unusual summer, with weeks of drought. I had to water the garden almost every day, and we received a notice from the city that our water consumption was unusually high thanks to this lack of rain. The weather finally returned to normal a few weeks ago: high temperatures followed by intense tropical storms followed by more heat. Our eggplants seem to love this combination of heat and heavy rain. They're growing like crazy and covered with flowers. Unfortunately, the mosquitos seem happy too, and I'm back to gardening in long-sleeves and sweat pants to avoid them. I'm not so sure about the watermelons, and hope that we'll produce at least one big melon by the end of the summer. I've been keeping an eye on the little melon I hand-pollinated, and it hasn't grown yet but it is green and healthy. We all hope this one will make it.

Single yellow female seeks partner

According to the census bureau, Alaska has 114 single men for every 100 unmarried women, the highest ratio of men to women among all states. That makes the odds good for a single woman in Alaska, but a female squash blossom has an even better chance of finding a partner. Yesterday was typical, with 20 male flower blossoms on my squash plants, and only one female. The first flowers to appear on my plants were all male, and it was weeks before the first female appeared. Those early male flowers shriveled and died without their reproductive imperative fulfilled.

As a vegetable gardener, I have mixed feelings about all those male flowers. While their bright yellow blossoms are attractive, they are merely ornamental -- only female flowers can produce a squash -- and our goal is the harvest. It is easy to tell the difference between the male and female flowers -- they have different centers clearly visible when the flowers are open (the female is on the left), and the females have a tiny squash starting on the stem just under the flower. If the female flower isn't fertilized, this squash never develops and the flower drops off. I saw this happen several times on my Benning's Green Tint plants, and I felt like a huge opportunity had been missed.

I may sound a bit obsessed by my battle against the Squash Vine Borer, but I know that eventually I will be miss an egg, and a voracious caterpillar will soon after send my plant to the compost heap. So when I am lucky enough to have a female flower, I no longer leave anything to chance. I cut off a male flower, remove the petals, and hand-pollinate the female. There are always plenty of male flowers available, making it easy to sacrifice one. And this form of artificial insemination should guaranty a baby squash in the future. I hand-pollinate in the morning when the flowers are open and loaded with pollen.

There are never many female flowers to pollinate, so there are always many extra male flowers. I've always left them on the plant to close and wither after a day or two. Yesterday, I decided to remove them for David to use in the kitchen. In restaurants, squash blossoms are quite a delicacy. This is due in large part to the ephemeral nature of these blossoms. They're good for about a day once cut from the plant, making for tough logistics in the restaurant business. Of course, we just have to transport ours from the yard to the kitchen, but we still had to cook them quickly.

David used a Mario Batali recipe for fried squash blossoms. Batali's instructions are useful: step one, check for insects. This was not a bad idea since I always spy ants crawling all over the centers of the blossoms. And when I was carrying the blossoms, a bee kept flying into the centers trying to harvest the pollen before I disappeared into the house. None of the ants seemed to have survived the day in our refrigerator and the bee stayed outside, so David was able to quickly stuff the blossoms with a ricotta filling and fry them in oil. The blossoms were dressed with a yellow tomato oil made with our yellow pear tomatoes, and the combination was sublime.

The food disappeared quickly, leaving me wanting more. This morning I was not surprised to find 18 new male flowers on our Benning's Green Tint plants. Unfortunately, there were no females to be found, so I removed every flower and quickly stashed them in the refrigerator. I can't wait for another helping of fried squash blossoms for dinner; those abundant male flowers won't be wasted any longer. Squash blossoms makes the wait for an actual squash harvest almost tolerable.