I do the hand pollination thing with a small artist paintbrush, because my original - whatever you call cotton on a stick in your part of the world (cotton buds, cotton swabs, etc)- fell to bits, and was really only a stick by the end.
But Ive been wondering if picking a handful of male flowers, and dropping into a blender of water, might just give me a pollen shake to spray into the female flowers. Obviously it would depend on the survivability of pollen in a blender. Its just an idea, and although a quick search didnt find it, it may well have been tried.
It might be a really quick and easy method to pollinate things that dont do the thing with the bees for whatever reason.
I suspect the reason my cucumbers are not getting pollinated, is because there dont seem to be any bees. I seem to remember something about bees mysteriously dying out or something.
I have no idea if it will work, but given none of my cucumbers set fruit without my intervention, it should be easy enough to test. I think all Ill need to do is separate two of my four cucumber plants, and spray one with the pollen shake, and leave the other untouched. The two remaining plants Ill keep pollinating by hand because I need the cucumbers.
This experiment will have to wait for a while, because Ive hand pollinated all the flowers this week. Ill separate the two test plants, and wait until they stop producing fruit before I start the test. Ill use the delay to see if anyone else is doing it, or if it wont work for some reason.
120 Things in 20 years - Its 6am and I havent slept yet.
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