Flowers have started appearing on some of the plants so I had a quick Google to see if my assistance was required in reproduction.

Specifically, the plants I was interested in were the pea plants, the tomato plants and the chili plants, each of which has a number of flowers now. I was surprised to see that a different approach was recommended for each plant, so I thought I would sum up my findings here. The specific botany, biology and zoology for the reproductive process is outside  the scope of this blog but the pollination article in Wikipedia should make for a good starting point. As I understand it from Mrs. McCahill’s second year biology class c.1995, it has something to with the stigma, stamen and pollen and cameos in certain cases from insects.

Poke: Chili
You need to distribute the pollen from chili plant flowers to other flowers on the same plant. If a flower is not fertilised it will simply fall off after blooming. If you don’t like getting your hands dirty you can use a q-tip / cotton swab / cotton bud to carefully transfer the pollen from flower to flower:

However, if you are a young male risk-taker like myself you maybe just want to poke the flowers with your finger in succession to spread the pollen:

I have tried both techniques and can vouch for them both working equally well.

Shake: Tomatoes
Tomatoes are a little more  accomodating when it comes to pollination. In the breeze outside, the plant moves enough to allow the pollen to do it’s job. If however like me you live in Ireland and trying to grow tomatoes outside seems silly, just give the plants a gentle shake every now and then. I read in a few places that noon is the best time for pollination in terms of temperature and humidity this is a little too pedantic for my liking.

In order to illustrate the technique I have cleverly added cartoon shake lines to the picture below. As you can see our mini-greenhouse is filling up quickly.

Leave: Peas
Pea plants seem to have done very well when the plant kingdom were handing out reproductive systems. They don’t need any mechanical assistance so will pollinate fine left to their own devices. Good stuff.

It was difficult to illustrate not touching something but I did my best with a jazz-hands style pose:

I was initially wondering whether we would get many insects up on our 3rd floor balcony as other than our plants it’s a bit of a concrete jungles. I was therefore glad to see some bees hovering around the flowers on the sage plant last week:

And I think we can all agree that the real plus is that I made it through the whole post on mechanical assisted reproduction wihout any double entendres. Phew.