Let me start with a funny story.. I think in 2016 I’ve grown a pumpkin with one single pumpkin seed. It was stunning to see how the plant grow in my apartment, almost 2 meters long and covered a good amount of space in my living room. It also had many flowers with a bright yellow color. Every time it shined in the room, I got excited that I can get a pumpkin but all of them were falling apart after few days.. I have travelled to Konya to visit my family when I had my plants at home – I asked a friend to take care of them. One evening, we went to my grandparents’ home and I was proudly telling them about my pumpkin and then sadly that the flowers were falling instead of turning into fruits. My grandfather started to laugh out at me and asked me how those flowers would pollinate without any bees or flies.. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️😓 I was embarrassed… You know, as a person who studied in high school and university, has totally forgotten about the pollination 🙂 It was a good lessons learned…

So now, I have my tomatoes at home, they started to have some flowers this week and I waited for few more days to have a few more of them. Meanwhile I talked to my mom to learn how I can how to pollinate them as there are no bees or bugs at home, and I don’t know if there can be in the balcony.. She said she doesn’t know but suggested to use cotton swabs.. I told her that I’ll search a little bit and then decide what to do..

And as you guessed !! My mom was right, using cotton swab is one of the method to pollinate tomatoes at home. I watched few videos and read some articles. I think this video summarises everything. So I took a cotton swab and used it to distribute the pollens from anthers to stigma (I re-learned all these names after soo many years 🙃)

I’ll continue to do this the next few days to increase the possibility and also do the same for the new flowers that will blossom soon. In the next few weeks I expect to see some fruits – hopefully 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Here is the video I took about how I pollinated my tomatoes.

My cucumber, basil and spinach are also growing.. My mom told me to wait for the 4th leaves to come out for the cucumber before I put them into their own pots. No need for a search 😉

alladola, 5th April 2020, Dublin