Grow Your Own Vegetable Seeds The Professional Way

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[4] Finally, clip the female flower shut again to prevent further pollination. Be sure to mark the blossom in some fashion so that you can later distinguish the fruit it produces from that borne by blossoms pollinated by insects.

You can hand-pollinate peppers and eggplant in much the same way . . . except that their flowers are "perfect" . . . that is, they contain both male and female parts. So you just have to pick any flower from one plant and rub it against any other from a different plant. The receptive blossom, of course, should be clipped both before and after this operation. (Actually, peppers and eggplant-like their cousin, the tomato—are largely self-pollinating, but bees visit these fruits so much that a good deal of crossing occurs anyway.)

Like the cucurbits, corn plants have separate male flowers (tassels) and female flowers (the ears). Pollen formed on the tassels is carried by the wind to the silk (stigmas) produced by the ears. To handpollinate, place white paper bags over selected ears before the silk appears. Secure the bottom of each sack with a rubber band or length of twine. When pollen shakes away from the tassels easily, cut one off and rub it against the silk of ears growing on different plants. Then replace the bags until the ears mature.

CAGING

The flowers of most garden vegetables are just too small and/or they produce too few seeds to make hand-pollination practical. In such cases, caging -which is just what the name implies—offers a sure-fire way to achieve the isolation and control you're after. (Just be sure to include at least five plants of the same type in each cage to encourage vigorous cross-fertilization.) As shown in the illustration which accompanies this article, you can easily construct cages from materials found around the house . . . but different types of screening must be used, depending on whether the enclosed plants are pollinated by the wind or insects.

Cages for wind-pollinated plants should be covered with muslin or cheesecloth to exclude the extremely fine pollens characteristic of these types. (Spinach pollen is so microscopic, however, that you might as well forget caging altogether and just take your chances that no one nearby is growing another variety for seed.) In order to make sure the pollen is well distributed within your cages, give the enclosures and/or the plants inside a few shakes every two or three days.

When caging vegetables that are pollinated by insects, your mesh need only be fine enough to keep the critters out. Window screen is excellent for this purpose. Remember, though-in order to ensure pollination—it will be necessary to place insects inside the enclosures. Honeybees are ideal for this purpose, of course, but for obvious reasons they're hard to handle. And if kept away from their hive, they soon die. Flies, however, offer a good alternative and you can breed your own by setting out a pan of raw meat or innards. The flies will lay their eggs in the rotting flesh . . . and when maggots appear, you can just place the container of infested material inside your cages. The maggots will soon metamorphose into adult insects, which will then pollinate the fruits or vegetables.

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