Here’s Why You Need To Try Hand Pollination

Looking to see how you can increase the harvest of your garden? Well, I encourage you to try hand pollination! In this post I will share my tips and tricks for hand pollination to help give you the best chances for a successful harvest!

What Is Hand Pollination?

Hand pollination is a technique used to manually move pollen from a male flower to pollinate a female flower. This can be done with a tiny paintbrush, or Q-Tip.

Why Should I Hand Pollinate?

I would encourage you to try hand pollination for the following scenarios:

1. You have a small garden
2. You want to increase the quality of your produce
3. You want increase the production output of your garden
4. You are growing fruits or vegetables for the first time

One of the best ways to boost your confidence as a newbie gardener is when you have your first successful harvest!

With a smaller garden you may not have as many pollinators coming to your garden, so hand pollination is a great way to help boost your chances of a successful harvest!

How To Hand Pollinate

The basics of hand pollination are fairly simple, it is the manual transfer of pollen from a male flower to a female flower. Some flowers have both male and female parts, however for hand pollination look for plants that have separate male and female reproductive parts.

• First identify the male flower with the “stamen.”
• Then identify the female flowers which have a “stigma.” This is the “sticky” section of the female flower, towards the inner center.
• Use a small paintbrush or q-tip and gather pollen from the male flower and transfer to the female flower. Gently rub the pollen inside the female flower to successfully transfer the pollen.
• See an example of how to hand pollinate corn below, it is a little different!

What Can I Hand Pollinate?

There are endless options of what plants you can hand pollinate, however hand pollination all depends on the plants anatomy and if they have male and female reproductive parts.

See here where I recently grew corn using hand pollination methods!

Some examples of what can be hand pollinated:

• Corn
• Pumpkins
• Peppers
• Squash
• Strawberries
• Tomatoes
• Zucchini

Good luck and I hope you have a successful harvest!

-Kate