Today, I got a chance to help out the many busy pollinators out there in the garden. We planted watermelon vines both in the front garden where we planted them with success last year and in the back since I had an extra seedling.

This morning I noticed an open female flower on the back vine but not a male flower in sight! What’s up with that? All dolled up for the Ball but no date!

You see, in order for the female flower to mature into a fruit it needs to be pollinated by a male flower. That’s where the birds and the bees and other pollinators come in – they fly around, gather pollen grains from male flowers and buzz into a female flower looking for more pollen and as a result fertilize the fruiting body of the female flower.

Interestingly, each seed that you find in say, a watermelon, is represented in the flower’s ovary (yes, flowers have them parts too.) Each ovule needs a pollen grain to mature into a seed. So that’s a good amount of pollen grains since there are many seeds in most veggies and fruit. If only a few seeds are fertilized then the fruit will likely shrivel up and die (sniffle) or if all the seeds aren’t fertilized you may end up with a misshapen veggie or fruit.

Most flowers then, need multiple visits from our pollinator friends. One gauge of how large and diverse your pollinator population could be your rate of unfertilized female flowers and oddly shaped veggies.

As hard as all those busy pollinators are buzzing from flower to flower doing their thing – I had doubts that they would make a special trip out front to find the appropriate pollen for our potential watermelon.

Matchmaker, matchmaker…

So I got the buzz on and beelined to the front in hopes of finding a nice date for our lonely female flower.

I found a nice specimen bursting with pollen and carefully plucked it off the vine.

After I made the trip to the back, I carefully peeled away the petals to expose the stamen.

Then I gently brushed the stamen to the center of the female flower where the ovules are located – making sure I got as much pollen in there as I could.

That’s it! Hopefully she got fertilized and we will be enjoying a nice Sugar Baby watermelon in a month or so.

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It’s serious…they have named a disorder after it. Colony Collapse Disorder (when ever scientist can’t figure out a cause for something they use the descriptor ‘disorder’) or CCD. We’re talking honey bees here. For some unexplained reason over the last 2 years, 25% of the western honey bee population has disappeared. Entire honey bee colonies have died off. There are many theories – use of toxic pesticides and herbicides; the introduction of genetically modified crops (hmmm, canary in the coal mine?); industrial agriculture’s penchant for planting acres and acres of the same thing (I think of it as ‘monoculture disorder’); parasites, viruses and mites.

Why should we care? You might think – “eh, I don’t even like honey so, whatever.” But wait – those busy bees are busy pollinating so you can enjoy over 100 different fruits and vegetables -In fact, over 1/3 of our food supply! In terms of dollars – bees help produce $15 billion in crops each year! To learn more, check out this very educational short video.

But honey bees aren’t the only ones buzzing from flower to flower. Honey bees were originally imported from Europe and there was a time when native wild bees did most of the work – well, along with butterflies, humming birds, wasps and many other critters. We just have to diversify the plantscape to attract these native workers back into our gardens and fields.

One way to ensure an abundance and diverse pollinator population is to grow plants that attract these pollinators to your garden. Some of these plants will be your fruit trees and veggies but also various decorative flowering plants. Diversity is key so that you have something flowering in succession most of the year.

We’ve been slowly incorporating more pollinator friendly plants – dill, sunflowers, fennel and lavender to name a few but as we plan our future plantings we’ll take info from Dr. Gordon Frankie’s wonderful site and add various pollinators into the mix.

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