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!
