Do we really need to pollinate our tomatoes?

Often I get antsy and start searching the internet to find garden information. I stumbled upon an article from the New York Times headlined “Gadgets to Help Tend a Garden.”

The first gadget described in the article was the VegiBee. Apparently, the inventor had a disappointing crop of tomatoes one year and he came up with the Vegibee to help increase his yield. The inventor felt that his tomatoes were a failure because they were not being adequately pollinated and that the bees were not doing their job.

Whoa!! I had never heard that before! Now here my garden in Guerneville, CA on the Russian River, I have been growing tomatoes for years and I can swear on a stack of bibles that I have never ever seen a bee on my tomato blossoms looking for pollen. And I found another gardening forum comment that mentioned that there are not many other insects either that are attracted to tomatoes flowers. I never considered the possibility that the tomatoes I have always harvested in past years were created by some type of pollination process or that I needed to insure that it was taking place properly as a factor in my yields.

The fact is that I have mostly had very high tomato yields and I never did anything to get them. The only times I have small yields is due to weather, temperatures, watering & fertilizer issues, etc. I have never seen a need for me to blame the bees since I never saw any.

Further internet research led me to discover that tomatoes are self pollinating (Ooops! This is the wrong term. See discussion below). I did not know that. They have all of the parts to complete the act to produce tomatoes for you, therefore bees or other pollinating insects are not really necessary. All it takes, when the blooms are ready, is a slight breeze and gravity. Some recommend that every time you pass by your tomatoes, you should give your plants a slight wobble or shake and this will help to dislodge pollen to get the process going.

One post I found stated that it is wrong to say that tomatoes are self-pollinating (see Old Drone blog). The post, entitled, “A simple explanation of tomato pollination, please?” states: “The tomato must have help. It requires MOTION to release the pollen. Wind can accomplish this to some extent. Pollen grains are shaken loose and may land on the sticky stigma, thus accomplishing fertilization of some of the seeds. Note that this is not self pollination, as the tomato could not do this of itself.”

Also, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollenizer), “a plant can only be a pollinator when it is self-fertile and it physically pollinates itself without the aid of an external pollinator, as in the case of apomictic species like some rowans and hawthorns.” Therefore, tomatoes can never truly be self-pollinating because they need an external pollinator such as bees or wind or human intervention.

The inventor of the VegiBee also mentioned in the Times article  that his device improves upon the use of battery operated toothbrushes that some people apparently use to release tomato pollen. What? Can you imagine people in their gardens with an electric toothbrush trying to pollinate their little yellow flowers? Some posters in internet forums (see my Google search link) mention that others just use a regular toothbrush. Other posts suggest using a light paintbrush or a pencil. The image that is created in my mind of someone doing this is beyond ridiculous in my opinion. Tomato blossoms are generally very small in the first place and they look awfully delicate to me. I would personally find it very hard to do anything that might damage them in any way. There is no way I would be nudging them with a pencil or any kind of toothbrush.

Once my tomatoes get going in my garden with lots of sun and warm temperatures, the flowers show up like countless yellow stars in a sea of green. This is is especially true of the cherry varieties I have grown over the years.  So, why should I be standing in my garden over these plants with an electric toothbrush trying to pollinate every one of those little blooms in order to increase my yield? I will answer my own question: “Ain’t gonna happen around here! No way and no how!” I feel it is not necessary to use such a tool, even without bees and I find it hard to believe that people have the time to do this when there are so many other fun and important things that need to be done in the garden.

If you want or feel you need a VegiBee or a plain old electric toothbrush, then go for it. I will let the warm breezes do the work for me or I might gently shake my plants to release the pollen that is necessary to create delicious tomatoes. I will then smile and move on to other satisfying garden chores.

Compost Bins

Well, here are my compost bins! Not pretty to look at, I agree, at but they are extremely utilitarian and functional. Note the holes drilled in the side! Note the 1/4" hardware cloth wrapped around the bins to keep out critters and to let some air in!

These two bins are the ones I use to compost all leftover, unused and uneaten food, including meat and bones, dairy, grease, cakes and cake icing, moldy bread, all cooking and baking disasters, etc., etc., etc. You get the idea! Everything, and I mean everything, goes in. In a previous post, I even admitted that I put some water into an empty jar of salsa or an empty container of salad dressing or even mustard, swish the water around with the lid on, of course, and this solution is also used in the compost. Remember that I am one of those people who believes that if a human being could or can eat it, then it can be composted. I cannot imagine ever going back to tossing out moldy bread into the garbage.

I layer my kitchen waste with shredded newspaper, garden soil, brown snow (aka redwood tree needles), and, sometimes, steer manure. This is a compost that never really heats up and I never turn it. I have taken the top off and found tons of fly maggots working on the contents and with some minor digging into the pile, I have discovered tons of fat worms doing their bit. I guess I have created essentially worm bins here. The extremely raw, if you will, compost goes into the bin with all of the holes in it to let in extra air to reduce odors. Then, when I think it has broken down after many weeks, I use a small garden fork and transfer the contents of that bin into the bin with the smaller number of holes. I still do not turn it, the worms keep working on it, but the maggots have usually disappeared or are no longe alive. The second bin holds onto these contents until the first bin is ready to be emptied out again. Now, I use to take the contents of the second bin and toss them onto an open air compost pile I had lying on the ground. But since I have discovered tree roots growing up into these piles, I have decided to pile the second bin's contents directly into the garden for little bit more decomposition. Then I will spread it around. It looks great, but I have found that egg shells are still visible, bones that have been stripped of their meat and fat are still around, and to my ongoing shock, avocado skins, of all things, never seem to decompose! Go figure! Used paper towels and my shredded newspaper strips, which the worms seem to love, by the way, dissolve completely. But those pesky skins of the avocados seem to have the half-life of uranium. Maybe the defense department might be interested in this information I have discovered!!!

Hugelkultur

Even being laid up with a broken leg and a torn tendon in my ankle, situated here on my sofa with my leg up and my laptop on my stomach trying to type, I am constantly thinking about my garden and almost in tears that I cannot be out there doing gardening chores and harvesting vegetables.

But my laptop is my window on the world and I am taking advantage of that on a daily basis. I check out the Garden Rant blog daily and I have previously “liked” the Facebook pages of Sustainable Seed Co. and Mother Earth News.

I am currently in a mode where I am working to conserve water in my garden in an ongoing way. I am tired of paying high water bills. I am also very much in favor of leaving all of my garden waste (redwood fronds,  leaves, spent or dead plants) right in the garden instead of carting it all off to a compost pile. Too much work! Finally, I am tired of buying expensive fertilizers and really want to go back to natural fertilizers - with a main focus on manures.

So I have been looking at and putting into practice lasagna gardening techniques, before the injuries, and after examining a post from Sustainable Seed Co., I really like the concept of hugelkultur. Here are some informative links about this concept:

Hugelkultur: The Ultimate Raised Garden Beds, from the “Rich Soil” web site;

Hugelkultur: The Composting Raised Beds, from the “A Growing Culture” web site; and

Hugelkultur, Nature’s Raised Garden Beds, from the “A Way to Garden” web site.

The main idea of this type of garden bed and culture is the use of logs, limbs, and tree cuttings, rotten or new, at the base of the bed and then layering on, lasagna-style, other organic components until you have a large mound. Now, a lot of wood I get from around here in Guerneville comes from downed trees and limbs as the results of our winter rain storms. So, I am inclined to cut these up and use them in my wood burning Quadra-Fire stove. But I am sure I can locate enough to create hugelkultur beds. I just do not want those beds in huge mounds.

From: http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/

 

From: http://rescape.co.nz/methods/hugelkultur/

Handful of redwood tree needles I collected in front of my house 

and placed on a green metal bistro table on my deck. Note the
caked-on yellowish redwood tree pollen on the table.

I like using redwood tree needles in making compost, but when you have literally hundreds of thousands, maybe even miilions of them here in Guerneville alone, available to all of us who live here, we cannot compost them all even if we wanted to. They can drop off the trees year round since redwood trees are evergreen and not deciduous. There is a very brief period of time in the spring, I believe, when they seem to be absent or we have caught up with the immense amount of debris that has fallen during the winter, but as the summer drags on, you can literally see them collecting in the boughs of the redwoods and you know we are going to eventually have a brown snowfall. Yep, that is what I call it - brown snow. The first heavy Fall rainstorm and gusty winds will bring down zillions of them. River Road, here in Guerneville, is covered, roofs are covered, and you can barely see your steps or deck. This process continues throughout the fall and winter until the trees are almost cleared. During the heavy brown snow season I have literaly swept up so many of the leaves from my roof, gutters, decks, steps, etc. and all around my house, that I usually fill at least four, 32 gallon plastic trash cans. When I first moved into my house and had no compost pile, all of these needles went to the dump.

Now, I regard the needles as garden manna from heaven. Also, as noted in an article (Garden Doctors, by Lozano and Kilchherr, February 16, 2013) in the Press Democrat out of Santa Rosa, CA, redwood needles can be used around very acid-loving blueberries and presumably, other acid-loving plants. But I do not worry too much about the acid issue. Most plants love a slightly acidic soil to grow if there is a full complement of compost and nutrients that keep the acidity within a decent level. Also, when you compost the needles like I do, and compensate for their innate acidity by adding in various types of manures and using "green" manures from scraps and leftover food in my kitchen that is going bad, the acidity is lessened, in my opinion. By the way, I agree with the mantra of one of my fellow gardeners which is if a human being can eat it, it is okay to put in the compost pile. I compost everything I can get my hands on that comes from my kitchen. (Here's a little secret: I even put water into an empty salsa jar, for example, put the top on and swish it around to get the bits left in the jar. Then the liquid is poured into a kitchen waste collector and that is later taken to be composted when it is full.)

Now, the brown snow decomposes vey slowly if you just spread it around on the ground as a mulch, so it is best to compost it (http://www.hort.net/lists/medit-plants/dec99/msg00249.html). This is the first year that I am not do any composting in a pile with my redwood needles. I am doing sheet composting or layered composting. That is, I am spreading the needles in a layer, then adding on top of that, animal manures, sifted garden soil (to get the rocks out), composted kitchen waste (that I do separately in large trash cans with air holes), organic fertilizer such as blood meal to speed up the process, and compost I purchase by the cubic yard from out landfill operation. As I collect additional needles (almost on a daily basis), I put them down in a new layer and continue adding layers of the other items. I want to do everything I can to not disturb the soil by doing too much tilling or digging.

What I learned from the "Growing Home Wine" Workshop

The Guerneville Library

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On Saturday, February 9, 2013, I attended a Sonoma County Master Gardener workshop at the Guerneville Library entitled, "Growing Home Wine." The presenter was Master Gardener Dennis Przybycien. He did an excellent job and he even sent out via e-mail a copy of his presentation outline to all attendees who wanted it. Very nice idea to do that.

Now, I do not plan on putting in a home vineyard at my house here in the Russian River Valley anytime soon, and I do not plan on making my own wine. But, since all of our Library branches present these work shops for free, usually on a Saturday morning, I think that attending as many workshops as you can is a great way to hone your gardening skills and increase gardening knowledge. And, did I mention they are all free?

One important tidbit of information I got from this workshop is that Dennis feels that getting a soil test before you plant is not really necessary. He feels that these tests are expensive and while they do return a lot of data analysis for you, it is hard to interpret and the information does not really help. He feels that the main goal for soil is to get minerals and micronutrients in your soil that will help plants to grow. Adding compost is the main and least expensive way to boost up the productivity of your soil. He likes Happy Frog fertilizer because it slowly leaches into the soil and is a great mixture of other types of fertilizer and beneficial microbes. He is not a big fan of water soluble fertilizers since they leach straight through the soil.

The most important point he made in my opinion was that there are no hard and fast rules with regard to fertilizing and increasing the productivity of your soil and your plants. He stated that we should observe and take note of what is happening to our plants, then respond to what they are telling us. His message went on to indicate that we should not plunge ahead and pour in everything we can get our hands on and then wind up over-fertilizing our plants and the soil. I felt that this was more than an adequate response to those who make a drumbeat on the web and in garden books, and magazine articles of getting a soil test and then follow exactly what the soil test tells you to do. Can you believe that I have read on the web that there are those who do a soil test at the beginning of the planting season and at the end of the planting season?

I have never done a soil test at my house. And by the way, those personal home testing kits sold at garden centers and nurseries are totally useless. In working in my garden over the years, I have noticed that I have had extremely rocky soil in one location and then 15 feet away or less, I have discovered a heavy vein of clay soil that is several inches deep, if not more than a foot deep. How is a soil test supposed to help me to deal with that? The main solution is to add tons of compost and judicious amounts of natural fertilizers and minerals that will increase the microbe and fungi population and those other helpful critters also known as worms.

Sonoma County Master Gardeners have a great web site and I hope you have a chance to visit it. The gardening information there is extensive and the site is easy to navigate. You can also find out information about upcoming workshops at a library branch near you.

The only frost protection I do in Guerneville, CA

Here are some photos I took of the only frost protection I do at my house. The jade plants are very sensitive and I decided this year, after learning a hard lesson last year, that they should be covered in some way. So, I got some old towels and tossed them on at night and removed them in the morning. Voila, no frost damage.

I am particularly lazy about protecting plants from frost. I do not believe in expensive coverings from the nursery or using those spray-on products. Too much money and too much trouble. My philosophy  has been to designate any plants I want to protect because I am very attached to them and then use the least amount of effort I have to use to protect them. In the past, when I have bought perrennials, many of them have gotten "frosted" and did not survive. I decided that I was tired of spending so much money in replacing those plants and if a plant does not make it, then I say, "Goodbye to you and I will go and get something else to replace you." Yes, I do talk to my plants and I am getting ruthless with them in my old age. It's my garden after all.

My lemon tree, which is finally producing lemons for me - there are seven on it now, is somewhat sensitive to frost burn on the tips of new growth. In the past, I have put Christmas lights on it and that seemed to work. I did not do that this year. I told you I was lazy and I just did not feel like stringing up any lights this time. I also did not cover it with an old bedsheet. Well, it does not seem to have suffered any damage at all! Go figure.

The front door of my house with covered jade plants

The uncovered jade plants