We’ve been growing kale for a few months on the balcony, and have already enjoyed a fine few meals with it. A few days ago I was surprised while watering to find it crawling in long black and yellow things.

About 20 caterpillars had taken up residence on one of the kale plants and pretty much destroyed it overnight.  The pictures show the caterpillar-infested kale as I found it and after.  They really know how to do a thorough job!

I put a picture up on twitpic and tweeted looking for advice. After a few tweets from fellow gardeners it was clear that this incident was probably not entirely unrelated to the pretty white cabbage butterfly on the balcony not so long ago.  As the twitterers advised me, I removed the caterpillars by hand and checked for any eggs.

I can confirm the yellow glove is entirely a product of my own squeamishness. Gotta work on that. The plant is now caterpillar-free and the other plants seem unaffected since so looks like we got them all. Still, I’m very impressed they managed to find my minor kale patch in this concrete jungle. Anyone know if that’s normal? If this happens again I guess I will have to cover it with netting or similar.

I have been looking for some answers recently on the web but haven’t been able to find them – so I thought I would outsource the problem to you guys!

First of all, big thanks to Susan Gallagher for all the hard work she’s done on the new website. I think you’ll agree it’s a smashing job! Between that and working on the minor matter of the PhD it’s been a while since the last post so it’s time to get things rolling again.

There are many more experienced farmers and gardeners than me who contact me through this website and I am very grateful for all the advice I have received over the past year. For this post I wanted to try draw on the collective experience of the readers to decide what to do next,  wisdom of crowds style.

To that end, I have below a few polls covering gardening issues I have been grappling with. I encourage you to answer to the best of your knowledge. Don’t worry if you’re not an expert; the thinking behind the wisdom of crowds is that the collective intelligence transcends that of any individual!

Once I get a big enough sample size enough answers (gotta watch nerdy terms after being called “highly geeky” during the week!), I will implement whichever solution is favoured in each case, and of course document the results here.

In my microgreenhouse, I have two large tomato plants in big containers and at the top I have two cherry tomato plants in hanging baskets. Both sets of plants are getting a bit big for the available space in the greenhouse.

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We have been getting greenflies on and off on a couple of the plants for the last month or so.

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Answers on a postcard please! I look forward to putting to work whatever it is you decide I should do.

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.