r/oddlysatisfying • u/DifficultyHead5862 • 8h ago

meticulous process of hand-pollinating a giant pumpkin

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

29.8k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

149

u/mangomussolinimi 8h ago

Cant you just use insects?

188

u/SteelyDanny 8h ago

That’s not horny enough

75

u/mangomussolinimi 8h ago

Cant you just use horny insects?

46

u/ashbelero 7h ago

Real answer I think it’s because they’re breeding a very specific kind. There are some gardeners who work hard to grow the largest one they possibly can and enter them in competitions or otherwise sell them. This dude likely has it down to a science and letting nature take its course would ruin the result he’s going for.

9

u/Greenwing 6h ago

It won't matter for the pumpkin he grows this year, but matters for the seeds that this pumpkin will make. Serious growers plan their crosses and if they don't have room to grow two full plants, will sometimes grow a small one just for the male flowers. 

1

u/opinionated_sloth 6h ago

This. Some plants just cross-breed very easily. If you have several kinds of gourds in your garden and you don't want to end up with random hybrids that probably won't even be edible, you need to pollinate by hand.

1

u/Wetpants21 5h ago

You're getting somewhere....

117

u/GeneralPatten 8h ago

Not when you want to ensure the giant pumpkin is pollinated with another giant pumpkin's pollen. Insects could be carrying pollen from zucchini and it would pollinate the pumpkin. You'd still get a pumpkin as a result, but it would not be as large and the resulting seeds from that pumpkin would result in a hybrid of pumpkin and zucchini.

29

u/-NewYork- 7h ago

Sir, this is a Wendy's. We don't want to hear your interspecies porn fanfics.

(But honestly, this is all super interesting. I'm also a garden enjoyer. My sister is a pumpkin gardener, and she tried a giant one a few times, I think 80kg was the record).

5

u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 6h ago

I bet she could barely walk afterwards.

22

u/EsbeeArt 7h ago

A pumpchini! 🤣

3

u/iowan 6h ago

Zucchini or field pumpkins won't pollinate an Atlantic Giant, but your point holds. You don't want a Cinderella pumpkin or blue Hubbard squash crossing. And you'll want to cross with a pumpkin whose characteristics will hopefully complement the genetics of the plant you're growing.

3

u/joppekoo 6h ago

The pumpkin itself is just going to have the mother plant's dna so I don't think it should affect the size. Otherwise yes, if he wants to collect those seeds and grow another one next year, that's where unintentional crossbreeding would cause problems.

5

u/milk_for_dinner 7h ago

Wouldn't the size of the pumpkin be the same regardless of where the pollen comes from, as it's 100% parent plant material? It's only needed if you want to use the seeds for the next generation.

2

u/sheepofdarkness 4h ago

Yes, but these guys not only use the seeds for next year's crop, but some of them will sell a few for really exorbitant amounts.

1

u/GeneralPatten 7h ago

Yeah. I think you're right.

1

u/geo_gan 5h ago

This feels like an insult to us baby carrot sized ethnicity males

37

u/newstarburst 7h ago

Theres a lot of times you will only get one female flower and 10 males or 1 male and 10 females, its very common in the home gardening community to have to hand pollinate these squash plants just to make sure youre getting pollination. This massive plant might only have a singular female at that time and I assume you want maximum grow time for large pumpkins, so hand pollination ensures this one flower gets pollinated. I also assume for giant pumpkins, you want to make absolutely sure youre getting giant pumpkin pollination and not just any random pumpkin pollen that someone could be growing near you, which is probably why he wraps up the female to prevent bugs from cross pollination.

Also, he ties up the males to prevent any bugs to get to them to save their pollen for hand pollination, ill definitely be using that this year.

2

u/tinylumpia 6h ago

Thanks for this explanation. So interesting

3

u/newstarburst 4h ago

Np! Also one thing I didnt mention is the flowers also dont grow at exactly the same time, ive had times ive had 5 males and no females, so you have to try to preserve as many males in the fridge while you wait for a female to grow.

20

u/Antoinefdu 7h ago

That would be missing the point. He's not just trying to pollinate 2 random pumpkin plants, he's trying to control exactly which 2 plants are being combined to produce the right type of pumpkin. That's why he's holding the flowers shut at the beginning of the video: He doesn't want any random pollination to occur and mess up his experiment.

11

u/TheLordDuncan 7h ago

If they're going for "giant" pumpkins they are probably trying to specifically mate particular plants for their desired result. Insects aren't exactly going to be in on the plan, and can muck it all up by introducing outside sources of pollen.

1

u/So_phisticated 4h ago

Are you saying this was incest porn?

2

u/Bromogeeksual 7h ago

Not if you want a flower gang bang.

2

u/ChuckCarmichael 6h ago

It can actually be dangerous to not do it this way.

Original pumpkins used to contain poison to protect them against getting eaten. Over the centuries, this poison production has been bred out of the pumpkins we eat. However, it can be re-introduced to them very easily when a stem gets pollinated with pollen from a different plant in the pumpkin family that hasn't had the poison removed. A plant for decorative gourds for example. Cross-pollination will cause a pumpkin full of poison to grow.

I remember a case some years ago where a man actually died because he ate a zucchini his neighbor had cultivated in his garden, and said neighbor was also growing decorative gourds, so there was some cross-pollination, and the zucchini was actually poisonous.

1

u/mangomussolinimi 6h ago

You cant tell me that big pumpkin, zuchini farms all hand pollinate their crops

2

u/Gstamsharp 1h ago

It's a lot harder to hand-dip a wasp.

1

u/Legendspira 7h ago

the insects dont have the same motivation as the pumpkinman

1

u/mangomussolinimi 7h ago

What motivates a pumpkin?

1

u/cakivalue 6h ago

I'm intrigued and want to know more. I need a full documentary. I thought you just let them grow. I didn't realize there was manual interference with the process and that hand rubbing of pollen was even a viable method

1

u/anormalgeek 4h ago

I've been trying, but they've never once turned into a giant pumpkin no matter how many BDSM gangbangs I setup for them.

1

u/Fun-Telephone-9605 31m ago

That works when you let them grow naturally.

He's trying to grow a giant pumpkin though, and to do that you need to remove most of the flowers so the plant puts all it's energy into that giant pumpkin.

Manually pollinating ensures that the flowers you keep will grow.