Rescue A Fruit Harvest By Hand Pollination

Perennial food production is a wonderful prep. You can put in the work now and have food show up reliably into the foreseeable future. Fruit trees are a great example. Not only do they provide high quality food come good times or bad; but they can be very yard-friendly. But what do you do if the loss of pollination partners is threatening your crop? Salty and I ran into this situation, and the results of our experiment are now visible.

Why did we bother with hand pollination?

We did our experiment with apple trees. Most apples, including the Enterprise in our front yard, can not self-pollinate. They require a genetically different partner; and that means another strain of apples. To accommodate this, we originally had two mutually compatible different strains in the yard. Since that leaves no room for problems, last year I added a third compatible strain.

Last year, the Enterprise’s partner died. This spring I replanted, but neither of the two younger trees is ready to flower yet. The Enterprise was lonely. A bike ride around the neighborhood established no other apple trees close enough to be useful. Good time for an experiment, yes?

Why would anyone else bother with hand pollination?

You might need to hand pollinate a tree if you can get a pollen source, but it’s too far away for bees or other natural pollinators to do the job. You can also do it if one strain’s start to fade just as the expected partner’s are opening. Also, we’re seeing a large die-off in natural pollinators. (Honeybees do most of the work on my trees.) If the pollinators die off, no more apples without hand pollination.

How hand pollination is done

The basic idea is straightforward. You collect pollen from the anthers (or collect whole anthers and let them dry; they pop open to release pollen). Then you brush pollen from one strain of tree onto the stamen of the other. Apples have both sexes in each flower, so the pairing can go both ways.

The anthers of apple blossoms are the multiple yellow ovals inside the petals. The single stamen is in the middle.

I’d read about several methods of hand pollination. Many, like this one, seemed more labor-intensive and finicky than I preferred. It seemed to me there was an easier way, so I took the Enterprise Apple Problem as a sign that it was time to experiment.

Half a mile away there’s an apple tree in a churchyard. I don’t know what strain it is, but the look of the apples tells me it’s not an Enterprise. The churchman doesn’t mind locals helping themselves to products from the apple tree. I rode my bike over and collected a small bag of blossoms. (I spread out my takings, so it just helpfully thinned potentially overburdened branches.)

My version was very low-tech. Take blossom from churchyard tree; make it kissy-kissy my Enterprise blossoms by pushing the two blossoms face to face. Done. In case some of the churchyard flowers were less ripe and not releasing pollen yet, I used multiple churchyard blossoms. 

This is one of the blossoms of my Enterprise tree, about two days before I hand pollinated.

How did the hand pollination work?

Since this was just an experiment, I only hand pollinated about twenty-five blossoms on my Enterprise tree. As of today, I count nine apples growing on the Enterprise tree. That means between a third and a half of my attempts were successful, at minimum.

This is one of the growing apples…I think it’s the same very blossom, in fact — it’s in a good spot for Salty to get the camera on it.

The success rate at this step might have been better than it seems. We had a late hard frost, causing significant blossom loss on my Enterprise tree. Some of the remaining blossoms may also have been damaged. But no apples grow when cross-pollination was unsuccessful in this strain of apple, and the trees were too far apart for wind or bee; so there was definitely some success.

In short, this is a labor-intensive but at least not fussy way to get apples when natural pollination won’t happen.