Getting your first order of seed packets is pretty exciting and a little overwhelming. When our seeds arrived this past spring, we peeked inside some of them (who knew fava bean seeds were actually whole fava beans!?) and anxiously read the descriptions of others, promising us “sweet, tender leaves” and “intense, rich tomato flavor.” All we had to do was put the seeds in some dirt and sit back and wait.
Well, the seed packets also seemed to indicate that things would not be quite that easy. In addition to some basic watering guidelines, there were instructions for things I hadn’t even thought of. “Slightly acidic, calcium rich soil with a pH between 6.0 and 7.0”? “Control beetles with rotenone or pyrethrum”? As my confident optimism was quickly diminished, I began to wonder if we bit off a bit more than we could chew.
Fortunately, we put the doubts aside and went ahead with our experiment. However, from time to time problems arose that moved us to go back to the seed packet and learn about an unfamiliar term or process. We had such an experience recently. Our eggplant has been looking strong and producing lots of beautiful flowers. Those flowers – which ideally bear shiny, purplish black fruit – were looking pretty, but simply dying and falling off without the payoff. We fumbled for answers within our limited knowledge base, until a friend (thanks, Kacie!) told us it might be a problem with pollination and, alas, we would have to figure out what exactly that means.
While pollination can be quite complicated – when one is, for example, trying to create hybrid varieties – the basics of it are pretty intuitive and is something most of us know a thing or two about: sex. When one flower is very in love with another flower, something magical happens. This all should sound pretty familiar, except that plants, unlike humans, need the help of wind or birds or bees (pollinators), to move their special parts together. One good reason to have flowers in your garden – aside from looking pretty and making Kate happy – is that they attract pollinators. Some plants produce ‘perfect’ flowers that have both male (stamen) and female (pistil) parts. Other plants produce separate male and female flowers or even separate male and female plants.
For some plants and depending on your purposes, this is more or less important. Spinach for, example, produces separate male and female plants meaning that you need to have multiple plants – some of each sex – for pollination to occur. However, for many gardeners, pollination is not that important for spinach. Since we eat the leaf, we don’t need spinach to go to seed to harvest it. However, in the long run, pollination is essential to the survival of plants species and, ultimately, the non-human and human animals that eat them. For this reason, the disappearance of honeybees around the world (i.e. colony collapse disorder) is an especially troubling phenomenon.
In the case of eggplants (along with their brethren tomatoes and peppers), the plants generally produce perfect flowers that have both male and female parts. They are, in other words, self-pollinating. Because we are interested in eating the plant’s fruit and the fruit contains the plants seeds, pollination is necessary regardless of whether you are interested in saving seed.
So, what to do in the case of those pesky eggplants – the drama queen of the garden, according to Carolyn – that produce flowers, but no fruit. If the wind and bees aren’t playing matchmaker, then humans can step in and fill the role. Fortunately, being cupid for a stamen and a pistil is a little less awkward then between two people – all it takes (well, we’ll see if we actually get some eggplants) is moving a small clean paintbrush around the inside of the flower. If all goes well, the flowers special parts will touch and we’ll see some baby eggplants in the coming weeks.
~Brian
