How to Pollinate Tomatoes by Hand to Boost Your Harvest (2024)

FAQs

How to Pollinate Tomatoes by Hand to Boost Your Harvest? ›

Hand pollination of tomatoes is a simple process and it should be conducted on a warm sunny day for optimal results. You can simply shake the flowers by tapping behind the flower with your finger or with a pencil to stimulate the plant to release pollen.

Increasing your yield just takes a simple shake

The pollen will drop from the stamen of the flower onto the pistil. There's no magic number of times you should shake your tomato plants; you just sort of wing it. Gardeners usually do it two or three times a day to ensure good pollination.

Pollinating Tomatoes, Peppers and Eggplants

With our tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, pollination is fairly simple and can be accomplished in a variety of methods, including: Gently shaking or vibrating the plants or individual flowers a few times a week (daily is best) after flowers appear (see video below).

If you're wondering how to increase flowering in tomatoes, try increasing how much light they receive. Tomatoes need eight hours of daylight to flower. Sunlight gives your tomato plants the energy to produce fruit, so if your plant doesn't have enough sunlight, you're less likely to see tomatoes fruiting.

If you're faced with tomato plants not setting fruit, the best thing to do is to keep the plants healthy and fertilized with plant food, such as Miracle-Gro® Shake 'n Feed® Tomato, Fruit & Vegetable Plant Food. The plants will start to produce again when the weather becomes favorable.

Pruning at the right time directs energy toward creating and ripening fruit instead of making more leaves. Overall, you will probably have fewer fruit on a pruned plant, but it will be bigger.

If your goal is to maximize the harvest, prune suckers sparingly. A good compromise is to remove all suckers that grow below the first flower cluster. This helps keep the main supporting stem strong, but it doesn't remove upper suckers that will eventually produce flowers and fruit.

Despite being one of the most popular home crops, tomatoes have their share of sensitivities. They are extremely reactive to dips or increases in temperature, insufficient or excess irrigation, improper fertilization and pollination. All these can result in a plant that blooms but never fruits.

How can I improve my garden pollination? ›

Ensure that different types of pollinators visit your yard by planting flowers of different shapes, sizes, and colors. Planting flowers in clumps, rather than scattering single flowers throughout the yard, makes it easier for pollinators to locate their next meal.

No special tools are needed to pollinate tomatoes—just tap on the base of the flower with your finger. The movement will dislodge the pollen and gravity will help at least some pollen grains fall on the stigma. Some people find a thin pencil helpful for tapping the base of flowers in tightly packed flower clusters.

In the field wind movement is usually enough to cause pollination in a tomato flower, but at times there are very calm days and nights with very 'heavy' air and little wind movement.

Here's a brief horticultural lesson

Tomatoes are self-pollinating, meaning they have flowers that contain both the male and female parts, so more than one plant is not needed for reproduction. The pollen falls within the flower to pollinate itself. That doesn't mean insects and wind aren't important, though.

Despite being one of the most popular home crops, tomatoes have their share of sensitivities. They are extremely reactive to dips or increases in temperature, insufficient or excess irrigation, improper fertilization and pollination. All these can result in a plant that blooms but never fruits.