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Hand pollinating

I have been hand pollinating my 2 ghost peppers since they came in the house in the fall. I have harvested about 60 peppers from hand pollinating, and more are growing. Sometimes it doesnt work, sometimes it does. One thing I have learned is if I use my little paintbrush a couple of times a day on all the flowers they have a much higher growing rate. Morning and evening until the flowers are done. Thats my routine. I just finished pollinating the new batch of flowers again and noticed that some of them are starting to grow fruit. Some of the flowers dry up and fall off, but about half will grow fruit.

I tried using a q-tip to pollinate and like the paintbrush better.
 
Isaaccarlson said:
I have been hand pollinating my 2 ghost peppers since they came in the house in the fall. I have harvested about 60 peppers from hand pollinating, and more are growing. Sometimes it doesnt work, sometimes it does. One thing I have learned is if I use my little paintbrush a couple of times a day on all the flowers they have a much higher growing rate. Morning and evening until the flowers are done. Thats my routine. I just finished pollinating the new batch of flowers again and noticed that some of them are starting to grow fruit. Some of the flowers dry up and fall off, but about half will grow fruit.

I tried using a q-tip to pollinate and like the paintbrush better.
Thanks for that. I actually forgot this had to be done.

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I haven’t tried hand pollinating with a brush yet, but like DF says , I have some success just shaking the plants. I have about 70 blooms to experiment with.


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Isaaccarlson said:
Are you guys for real?? Just shake the bush? I never thought of that
 
Mother nature doesn't carry paint brushes. ;)  Some even go as far as an electric toothbrush touched to each flowering branch rather than the flowers themselves.
 
Honestly, I haven't tried any of your methods.  However, I do have an oscillating fan pointed directly at the pepper plants that runs the entire 16 hour light cycle.  That seems to be enough.  At least, so far.  We'll see what sort of fruit develops but, at this point, there are at least a dozen on the one NuMex Sauve Orange plant.  The others are smaller and are just beginning to develop flowers.
 
I don't worry about most species too much because the flowers seem to self pollinate so effectively, but if they're indoors I'll often use a small natural bristle paintbrush if I don't see a lot of pollen and a shake or simply rely on the oscillating fan once things are going well.  Because I'm controlling breeding right now I'm rocking the Q-Tips, which I'm not a big fan off.  Paint brushes don't go very far if you have to autoclave them each time you change plants.
 
Rocotos in my experience can be finicky and even when outside I'll often take a small paint brush or Q-Tip and go around the plant twice in the early season when they're aren't too many blossoms.  I tried the electric toothbrush for grins early this last summer and after getting nothing from many blossoms, one Rocoto flower did a big pollen dump just a moment after hitting it with the toothbrush.  Was kinda cool to try once, but using an electric toothbrush didn't seem particularly necessary or efficient.
 
...The purpose of the electric toothbrush being that the anthers of certain plant species will tend to hold the pollen until they detect vibrations within the range produced by the wing buzzing of their local pollinating insects.  We have a lot of bumble bees locally, which are much better pollinators of local plants than honey bees, which were imported.  Apparently this is because the bumble bee can generate a "bumble" by vibrating its wings when it lands on a flower and trigger it to release pollen. The honey bees can't.
 
CaneDog said:
...The purpose of the electric toothbrush being that the anthers of certain plant species will tend to hold the pollen until they detect vibrations within the range produced by the wing buzzing of their local pollinating insects.  We have a lot of bumble bees locally, which are much better pollinators of local plants than honey bees, which were imported.  Apparently this is because the bumble bee can generate a "bumble" by vibrating its wings when it lands on a flower and trigger it to release pollen. The honey bees can't.
 
Plant some borage next spring.  Bumblebees love borage!
 
nmlarson said:
 
Plant some borage next spring.  Bumblebees love borage!
Cool!  I'll see about giving that a go this spring.  I typically stage a few containers of hyssop throughout the garden to bring them in for the early rocoto blossoms, but once the rocotos are all covered in purple flowers I couldn't keep them away if I tried.
 
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