How Can You Tell If A Tomato Flower Is Male Or Female?

on October 25, 2022

Tomato plants are extremely popular to grow at home in your own garden. This is mainly because the plants are relatively easy to grow and they produce fruit that tastes so much better than what you can purchase at a supermarket. However, you may be wondering how to tell whether a flower is male or female and do you have to hand-pollinate the plants.

There is no such thing as a male or female flower on a tomato plant because all tomato plant flowers contain both male and female parts. This means that the tomato plants are self-fertile and therefore do not require a second plant to be present to generate fruit.

However, if you live in a region that has less reliable weather and you are growing the plants inside in the greenhouse or even indoors in your house it may be necessary to hand pollinate the plant to ensure that the plant produces fruit due to the lack of insects present.

Or alternatively, there are certain climatic conditions that will reduce the rate of pollination due to a reduction in the rate of insect activity. These include incessant rain which can reduce the number of pollinators that visit the plant. In these circumstances, it may be necessary to hand-pollinate the plant.

How To Hand Pollinate Tomato Plants

Hand-pollinating tomato plants is a relatively straightforward process and can be done one or two ways. The traditional method is to use a very fine paintbrush which can be used to transfer pollen within the flower from the male parts to the female parts.

To do this, take the brush and place the tip of it gently into the center of the flower and rotate it a few times to push the pollen around the flower which in most cases should result in pollination. To ensure that you get a good fruit set it is important to move systemically around the plant pollinating each and every flower that you can see.

This can be an extremely time-consuming process, particularly, if you have a few tomato plants. The alternative method is to use a chemical spray. Tomato Set spray is a commercially available product that contains a range of hormones that will trick the plant into setting fruit even if there is a lack of pollinators around.

The sprays are extremely easy to use and only require a couple of applications on the plants which will only take a few minutes to do. The plants need to be sprayed every 1 to 2 weeks in most cases during the period in which flowers are present on the plant. The manufacturers of these products recommend that you spray the foliage adjacent to the flowers until they are thoroughly wet which should be sufficient for pollination to occur.

Does Tomato Set Spray Improve The Pollination Of Tomato Plants

The use of a tomato set spray will aid in increasing the yield of your tomato plants even if you are in a location where there is some natural fruit set occurring. This is because the plant will increase the volume of flowers that set fruit and therefore will also increase the yield of the plant.

What Else Can You Do To Increase The Yield Of A Tomato Plant?

Aside from using a pollination spray, there are a couple of other important things that you can do which will encourage tomato plants to produce additional fruit. The first thing is to apply products such as tomato dust which contains relatively high levels of potassium which encourage the formation of flowers and fruits.

Additionally, it is important that you pinch out the side shoots regularly, which are the shoots that grow on a 45-degree angle between the main stem and the lateral leaves. These shoots need to be removed relatively early on before they get too large as the plant will start to focus on the production of foliage rather than flowers.

If this occurs in a region that has either a very short fruiting season or cool peak temperatures in summer the yield can be significantly affected.

The other crucial factor to getting large amounts of tomatoes is ensuring that you start the plants off early in the season. This can be done by planting the seeds indoors in a seed tray approximately 6 weeks prior to the last frost of the season.

Alternatively, if you do not have the facilities to grow seeds indoors at this time of year the other option is to purchase seedlings from the local garden centre which will allow you to get an early harvest during the season.

In the early stages of growing the seedlings in the garden, it is also beneficial to apply cloche or row cover to the plants which will accelerate the rate of growth when the weather is still relatively cold. This will typically bring the harvest forward by a week or two and therefore extend the length of the fruiting season and thus the yield.

It is also recommended that approximately 4 weeks prior to the first frost of the season that you remove the top of the plant as this will encourage the plant to focus on ripening the green tomatoes that are already present on the plant rather than developing new fruit. The green tomatoes can be removed from the plant when it dies back and is brought inside to ripen.

However, for them to ripen successfully they need to have reached full size for the particular variety that you are growing otherwise it is quite unlikely that the fruit will ripen when they are bought inside. To accelerate this process it is generally recommended that you store the tomatoes next to an ethylene-producing fruit as this will accelerate the ripening process. However, if the fruit is mature enough it will ripen quite happily on a window sill or even stored in a dark location.