Painting pollen to make the melons grow

Our honeydew and cantaloupes vines are producing flowers

Since our plants are protected under row cover, we have to figure out how to hand pollinate

Normally, having flowers on melon plants like watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew would be a great thing, but I was unprepared to see the flowers so soon! This is my first time growing melons and my first time growing melons under row cover. The row cover is providing a wonderful barrier to the pests and bugs that harm our plants, but it also blocks out the beneficial pollinating bugs like bees. Pollination is essential to get fruit. Due to deer and bug pressure, we are not quite ready to take off the row covers, so after a little research I found out that I can hand pollinate my melons to make the fruit grow.

 In order to hand pollinate melons, I needed to make sure that I had both male and female flowers on my plants. Male melon flowers will have a stamen, which is a pollen covered stalk that sticks up in the center of the flower. Female flowers will have a sticky knob called a stigma inside the flower (that the pollen will stick to) and the female flower will also sit on top of an immature, tiny melon. I needed at least one male and one female flower for hand pollinating melon plants. Come to find out, I had a lot more males than females, which is common in really hot weather and when the flowers first start growing. There is a certain amount of time pressure involved in pollinating as well, because melon flowers open for pollination only for one day.


After I made sure that I had at least one male melon flower and one female melon flower, I had two choices to hand pollinate the melon flowers. The first is to use the male flower itself and the second is to use a paintbrush. Since I am also an artist, I decided to use the paintbrush method.

I used a small paintbrush and swirled it around the male flower’s stamen. The paintbrush picked up the pollen and I “painted” the stigma of the female. I went back and forth between male and female flowers several times to make sure enough pollen would be transferred.

I hope it works! Come on baby melons!

 

Female flower



 

Male flower

 

Using a paintbrush to pollinate