Alright, so after I've studied a bit more about how baby tomatoes arrive in this world, my first reaction is to go get a humble pie and consume it fast. My previous post made a mention of how tomatoes are monoecious and I shared my un-scholarly interpretation. Monoecious doesn't mean that the same plant has both male and female flowers, as I'd written earlier. On the contrary it means, plants with 'perfect flowers', i.e. each flower has both the male and female parts of the plant. So pollination would require nothing but a lot of gentle vibration, for the pollen to shake off and reach the right part within the flower.
There are a lot of ways this can be made to happen. Commercial tomato plant growers are known to use bumble bees to do this...not because the bumble bees would aid pollination in the conventional manner bees are expected to work, but because the vibration emanating from the flapping wings of the insects would do the trick. So the key word here is vibration. And to achieve this, people use gadgets ranging from electric tooth-brushes to moustache trimmers to personal massagers to vibrators of the even more intimate kinds (eek!). I have none of the above, really. So for now, I'd just give them gentle taps every mid-morning or around that. For that's when the flowers are fully open and receptive. I'd keep us posted on my 'tappings' and 'shakes'. For now, it's another weekend.
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