I've been artificially pollinating my cucumber plants for a while now.
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 I've 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. It's just an idea, and although a quick search didn't find it, it may well have been tried.
It might be a really quick and easy method to pollinate things that don't do the thing with the bees for whatever reason.
I suspect the reason my cucumbers are not getting pollinated, is because there don't 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 I'll 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 I'll keep pollinating by hand because I need the cucumbers.
This experiment will have to wait for a while, because I've hand pollinated all the flowers this week. I'll separate the two test plants, and wait until they stop producing fruit before I start the test. I'll use the delay to see if anyone else is doing it, or if it wont work for some reason.
120 Things in 20 years - It's 6am and I haven't slept yet.
It's my intention to gain a new ability every 2 months for the next 20 years. I'd enjoy some company, some help, and some constructive criticism.
Things so far...
Animation
(5)
Aquaponics
(340)
Bread
(15)
Cheese
(16)
cooking
(49)
electronics
(57)
Epic adventurer
(20)
Escargot
(2)
Fire
(6)
Fraudster
(1)
Handmade fishing lures
(31)
Home made preserves
(11)
Making smoked foods
(11)
Mold making
(7)
Movie watcher and critic
(2)
Photography
(17)
PVC
(36)
Snail farming
(6)
Solar hot water
(26)
Solar photovoltaic panels
(7)
Stirling Engines
(11)
Thinking
(52)
Vermiculture
(1)
Wind energy
(26)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
You see CHIFT PIST a lot in the aquaponics forums and it means "constant height in fish tank, pump in sump tank". And its a very g...
-
The bell siphon was a clever thing for someone to design, and as such you feel a bit of that "clever" rub off onto you when you m...
-
A "bell siphon" is a device that automates the flooding and draining of an aquaponics grow bed, even though the pump is adding wa...
-
Apparently, marron come in two varieties. Hairy and not so hairy. Cherax cainii (smooth) and Cherax tenuimanus, or Margret River marron (hai...
-
A while ago I tried to make a fish fed fish feeder design that would allow the fish to feed themselves. I think It's made. I say &q...
-
Painting lures is easier if you don't know how. I don't, so I'm already well on my way. I started by owning a printer. That ...
-
The good thing about growing things like potatoes in aquaponics is they grow like crazy. The problem with growing things like potatoes in ...
-
Wire is one of the greats. It's power lies in its ability to be made shorter and apply great tension, with the application of many small...
-
With a little practice its possible to make a screw. If you bend your wire into an eyelet, its possible to make a screw in eyelet. The use...
-
If you pump air down into a submerged tube, when the bubbles rise to the surface, by virtue of the fact that they take up some space, they c...
No comments:
Post a Comment