Homestead experiment verified why people are seeing garden volume failure!
I planted a few tomatoes that were sold cheap due to damage, because I felt that they deserved a chance.
When I plant tomatoes, I work to give them the best chance. These were both suffering from a damaged stem. Since I plant them deep, it doesn't matter much on the broken stems. I remove all but the last two leaf pairs, and then plant the entire length underground. This makes them drought resistant, due to root depth; and all the removed leaves become new roots as well.
Planted in this fashion, they grow tall! Both hit over 5 foot tall, but set zero fruit for months!
Now for the experiment:
A few weeks ago, I pollinated the flowers with a Q-tip. These tomatoes are the result.
The other plant worked too:
There are more, smaller tomatoes on this one, it may be cherry tomatoes. But Both plants responded to pollination.
This tells us that we have poisoned our honeybees out of existence, and now people will starve; as a direct result of overuse of pesticides!
Now the fix, put in a hive even if you don't plan to harvest honey! Barring that, buy a lot of Q-tips, because without pollination; you will not have any produce, produced....
Corn pollinates by wind, and there are a few other pollination bees available; but this will be a significant ongoing problem if the SHTF!
Just be aware, we have done stupid things on crop spraying; so homesteaders and preppers need to make up the bee losses. I will be dusting more flowers soon myself!
Oh wow! I'm glad you figured it out. I was growing some pumpkin vines outside and they were only producing male flowers. When I planted some in my greenhouse, they produced male and female flowers. I literally got one pumpkin from outside, but inside I have multiple ones growing. I think mine is due to the excessive amount of water we've had this year in Panama. I see bees regularly around our place which is good.
Bees are pivotal, and pesticides are reducing them to critical levels! It will starve people, and needs to stop.
I'm glad you have a good bee population! You should post pictures of the pumpkins here for people to enjoy.
I've been told that tomatoes wind pollinate, but they didn't put on any fruit until I intervened and pollinated the flowers?
Stay safe!
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Interesting that you had to pollinate the tomatoes as well. I have done a few posts about my greenhouse. Waiting for a few of the pumpkins/zapallo to grow to be bigger. I have some crook neck squash growing in my greenhouse. There is a lot of spraying/pesticides used here, but we still see a lot of bees and bugs.
It hasn't reached critical mass there, but pesticides are dangerous to the honey bees. Glad they are hanging in, where you are! All we have to do is stop poisoning them....
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You are really good at this. While I do keep a garden I wouldn't say that I am good at it at all. My "maters" have done quite poorly in the past 2 years no matter what I try to do to help out. I am still in the learning phases of my green thumb though.
No, I'm not really good; but I think we Have to get good to Eat soon! They say they want 90% of us dead; and starvation is cheaper than bullets....
So plant, and disappoint them!
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