Hand-Pollinating Fruit Trees

Hi Everyone. I wanted to report on the results of my first attempt to pollinate my pomegranates by hand. I posted something about this on another thread - but thought it got lost in the shuffle - and I wanted to share it where more people might see it.

The last few years have seen a reduction in fruit set for my pomegranates. Not all varieties produce fruit prolifically - and some may just be too young to do so. And who knows why some years I end up with more pollinated blossoms than other years??? So . . . I thought I’d try giving them a hand, by pollinating the blossoms, myself.

It was very simple to do - and I believe the results are rather stunning!
I especially concentrated on my Granadas and a couple other varieties, because they were more dependable to carry fruit to ripen successfully. My little granddaughter helped. She did the lower branches and I did the higher ones. We used little artists’ paintbrushes and just went from flower to flower, spreading pollen.

The result (without actually counting developing fruit) was an increase of approximately 2/3.
In other words . . . last year my larger Granada had about 30 pomegranates developing . . .
and this year - close to 100!

More fruit might translate to more fungus, unfortunately . . . but also may give a larger amount of ‘clean’ fruit. We’ll see. All I know is that I am delighted to see how easy it is to increase the number of developing fruit . . . And I sure wish I’d tried to hand-pollinate years ago!

I will post some additional pics once the fruit starts to color up. Right now most of it is green . . . and doesn’t show up well against the green foliage.

There may be more - but it 's like ‘Where’s Waldo’ . . . and I couldn’t spot them in the photo!

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Great post thanks for starting this topic. I have a Santa Rosa plum that has bloomed the last two years and has not made a plum. I know others have reported this difficulty so I was wondering if some sort of hand pollination might help I had a methley plum planted right next to it, but it always bloomed earlier in the Santa Rosa. My methley is gone now got crushed during the tornado that I had . Santa Rosa is five years old, so I really don’t have much hope for it unless I can do some sort of hand pollination.

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@Bdav I have the same problem with my Santa Rosa. It’s about 10 years old (or more) and has only had a handful of plums in its entire life. I thought that perhaps its blossoms are fragile and easily freeze? But, who knows? The Toka next to it had the same problem until this year. It is covered with tiny plums at the moment . . . which I doubt will mature. Try grafting some other varieties to your Santa Rosa. Shiro is one that ‘boosts the ego’ after fruit failure! LOL It grows quickly and produces like mad. There must be others that will do well on your Santa Rosa. And in the meantime, while you wait for a Santa Rosa plum . . . you’ll have others, hopefully.
P.S. - I have never tried pollinating anything other that the poms and my stubborn PawPaws.
But, it’s worth a try.

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i may try this on some my trees . despite them being loaded this spring with blooms, they didnt set much fruit. im thinking i may have too many fruit trees together that bloom at the same time, that the pollinators cant keep up. i have plenty of compatable trees to cross pollinate so im thinking it could be not enough pollinators to get the job done.

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