Powerful Pollination
There’s a lot of things that we do in the garden almost unconsciously. Were we actually thinking about the ramifications of dropping burst tomatoes on the soil when we left them there? Definitely not, but we still benefited from the extra tomato harvest the following year. I personally did not even know until my sophomore year the reason for planting flowers in the garden! While the flowers are wonderfully pleasant to look at and add to the general aesthetic of the garden, their main function is to attract pollinators. These things were almost obvious in hindsight; in the moment, however, I was most certainly not thinking about those benefits.
Pollination is actually pretty significant for our garden. You might be thinking, “Annie, we plant different things every year. Pollination is for the plants to get fertilized so they can reproduce and we don’t need that.” PSYCH! Some of the vegetables that we plant would be little more than leaves and flowers without pollination. Any vegetable that produces a fruit needs to be pollinated for those fruit to develop (and so we can harvest that fruit). This includes produce like tomatoes, peas, squash, cucumbers, the list goes on!
Majority of the time, we don’t actually need to worry too much about the process of pollination because some of the vegetables that we plant are self-pollinators and others can get pollinated by having pollen being blown around by the wind. Furthermore, our aforementioned flowers do an excellent job of bringing in bees and other pollinators to our garden.
On the other hand, we also have certain plants that we do NOT want to get pollinated. That tends to be because we are not growing those plants for their fruit. The most obvious example is the lettuce. When we see the lettuce bolt, our beings become filled with dread as we realize that the time of harvest is soon to be over for these plants. Once the lettuce bolts, it does not focus as much on growing the leaves and those can turn bitter. Thus, it is imperative that we keep a close eye and make sure to remove any flowers and signs of bolting whenever we see them.
If we truly desired to or had a need to, we could self-pollinate our plants if they are difficult to pollinate or the flowers have not successfully fulfilled their purpose. Hand pollination is also done if the gardener is trying to avoid cross-pollination. We do not tend to have this issue so it should not be a huge concern. Hand pollination is a tedious procedure and I am personally in awe of anyone who does it regularly. One of the most well-known examples of hand pollination that we learn in Biology class is Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiment.
This extremely in depth experiment led to the discovery of the basics of the recessive and dominant gene as Mendel found that the offspring is not necessarily a combination of the parents. An important impact of this discovery is selective breeding or purposely having certain organisms reproduce in order to breed for specific traits. While it was definitely not a new concept, this discovery was able to help fine-tune the process more. While Gregor Mendel might not be the person someone might think of first when they hear the term “gardening,” he has definitely had a pronounced impact on the field.
Until next time!!!
