pollinating tomatoes

jazzycat 4/29/2013, 9:59 pm

So my tomato plants are getting huge, and the ones in the bed have hoops with tulle over them. They are starting to get a lot of flowers.
Every day I go out and check on them and mess with them, and usually flip the tulle up on one side during the day so bees (or whatever) can get to the flowers, and recover it at night. Today I sort of "shook" the plants, just in case, to help them along with pollination. Should I go ahead and leave the tulle off now? I've been keeping them covered to try and keep out the "bad" insects. I guess I'm not clear about when the cover comes off. Thanks bunches!

yolos 4/29/2013, 11:36 pm

You do not have to have bees to pollinate your tomatoes. You can just go by daily and tap each tomato plant to spread the pollen. I am pretty sure. Go to google and type in manually pollinate tomatoes. There are scads of info on this topic.

bwaynef 4/30/2013, 10:18 am

Tomatoes are self-pollinating. You don't even HAVE to manually shake them, but it won't hurt and could speed things up slightly.

**camprn** 4/30/2013, 10:28 am

bwaynef wrote:Tomatoes are self-pollinating. You don't even HAVE to manually shake them, but it won't hurt and could speed things up slightly.

As our member Pollinator has pointed out in the past, the correct term is that tomato plant blooms are self fertile but require a mechanical means to move the pollen. This could be a gently tug on the plant support/string, the wind or a visiting insect.
http://pollinator.com/self_pollinating_tomato.htm
check out the home page and the blog too.

jazzycat 4/30/2013, 10:33 am

So, now that I don't have worry about pollination, should I remove the tulle? It is keeping a lot of debris out of the bed, so I'm inclined to leave it on for now. When do you guys permanently remove the tulle on your beds?

**RoOsTeR** 4/30/2013, 11:36 am

Depends on what the purpose of your tulle was.

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pollinating tomatoes

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