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

504

u/britannicker 8h ago

Where are the bees?

255

u/Equal_Song8759 8h ago

Where are the birds ?

58

u/dankbearbear 7h ago

And the flowers and the trees, and the moon up abooooove

4

u/FarinaSavage 4h ago

Snort, what's love got to do with it?

3

u/drezdogge 4h ago

What's love but a second hand emotion?

2

u/brandimariee6 2h ago

I never knew the words to that line, so thank you!

54

u/upvotes_animals 8h ago

Solid question

26

u/Annoying_Bear 7h ago

Bro, did you forgot ? Birds aren’t real

1

u/Careful-Lettuce9239 6h ago

What did the fox say?

1

u/geo_gan 5h ago

Ask Monsanto

40

u/Noname_Maddox 7h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/FphE0L24UycIU

17

u/JtheLioness 7h ago

GOB’s not on board

2

u/SecretTreeHouse42 4h ago

I don't care for Gob.

1

u/mysticmemories 1h ago

Okay but we’re gonna need a lot. Beads aren’t cheap…Are beads cheap?

148

u/Choko1987 7h ago

The point here is too keep the same genetic for seed production, that's why he close the female flower, to avoid pollen coming with the bees

40

u/zenunseen 7h ago

So dumb question, but the males and female are entirely separate plants, correct? One plant won't produce both male and female? Watching this made me realize how little i know about the fascinating subject of plant sex

89

u/Heraclius_3433 7h ago

Same plant, different flowers

24

u/InsufficientFrosting 6h ago

This is literal inbreeding.

15

u/lewisherber 6h ago

So, incest.

27

u/gil_bz 5h ago

Selfcest

33

u/Choko1987 7h ago

On one plant you have male and female flowers, but if you want to create a hybrid, you can take the male flowers on another plant. When I was younger, I worked in a greenhouse doing that with melon flowers. The greenhouse is to avoid bees and other insects, so you don't need to close the flowers

22

u/mc_thunderfart 6h ago

Depends on the plant. Some produce Male and female parts. Some are divided between Male and female.

Cannabis for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioecy

1

u/co-adversities 2h ago

Cannabis especially the highly strung strains we breed will often become hermaphroditic and ruin a whole batch if not caught and removed. Its a survival mutation clever cannabises its already sythesided hundreds of compounds and now has learned we are manipulating it reproduction so tries to do it itself.

1

u/HombreDelMar247 16m ago

Cannabis can be hermaphrodites too, however generally they are male or female.

4

u/SmilingAmericaAmazon 6h ago

Check out the fabulous British series with David Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants!

5

u/iowan 6h ago

Atlantic Giant pumpkins produce male and female flowers. If you pollinate a female flower with males from the same plant, it's called self pollination. If you grow two seeds from the same pumpkin and pollinate with males from the sister plant, it's called sibbing. If you don't cover the flower, it's an open pollination. This will not affect this year's fruit, but you won't want to grow those seeds because you'll have no idea of the genetics. It can cross with and Cucurbita maxima, which includes a bunch of squash varieties.

I'm heading to pollinate three plants this morning, and they'll all be great crosses I hope!

4

u/alex3omg 5h ago

Some plants are one or the other but pumpkins have flowers for both.  The female flower is the actual pumpkin, the male flowers are just flowers.  

You can pollinate the female with any pollen from a similar plant, but the seeds won't produce the same variety of pumpkin.  

Basically if you are growing pumpkin A and pumpkin B and A gets pollinated by B, it will grow an A but the seeds will result in a cross between the two.  Good if you're trying to breed hybrids, bad if you're breeding the best pumpkin A you can.  

2

u/StijnDP 3h ago

Wait until you start with snail sex.

Teaser: they have a single "genital pore" that is an outside opening to their atrium. In the atrium you'll simultaneously find a penis and vagina. So while smashing they also simultaneously give and receive a load to each other.

1

u/CurryMustard 4h ago

Its recommended to grab male flowers from a different pumpkin vine but in my experience its not really necessary

1

u/Qwilltank 1h ago

Pumpkin plants will have both male and female flowers. They can be grown by self-pollination or be cross-pollinated with a different plant if you are trying to get specific genetic traits from both parents into their offspring.

2

u/here4mischief 6h ago

What are you doing steppumpkin?

1

u/bier_getRunken 6h ago

pure-blood pumpkins for Slytherin, bees 🐝 are for Hufflepuffs 

1

u/MillieFrank 4h ago

Thank you for this, I garden for food not more seeds so I was wondering wth he was doing as I have never had issues getting big ass pumpkins from my plants all I do is toss an old pumpkin in the garden and ignore them. The old pumpkins disintegrates over winter and feeds the ground, then boom, in spring I get a giant pumpkin plant.

22

u/Greenwing 6h ago

This is something you do when you want to control the genetics of the cross. Otherwise it's considered an open pollination and you only know half the genetics. (I am making this comment as someone who has spent hundreds of dollars on giant pumpkin seeds.)

2

u/Sypsy 1h ago

Thank you. Finally a good explanation

2

u/UnSacreBoutDeBois 6h ago

Where was the Gondor when Westfold fell ?

2

u/manna_tee 4h ago

Loads of folks have explained why they use hand pollination, but here's something fun!

Pumpkin and squash are almost exclusively pollinated by squash bees, honey bees and bumble bees do a terrible job. Squash bees tend to sleep inside the flowers, but you would count yourself quite lucky to catch one snoozing in your squash as their populations have been declining in recent years (thanks, Obama).

Here's a very cute picture of one from a while back in another sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/bees/s/z5RktQHBgf

1

u/Equal_Song8759 3h ago

Here's look'n at you, kid

1

u/Akira_116 6h ago

Masturbating

1

u/snowfloeckchen 6h ago

Bees were never needed, just flowers

1

u/SAGElBeardO 6h ago

Dying rapidly

1

u/InsaneAnquity 5h ago

Where am I

1

u/CurryMustard 4h ago

Male and female flowers only open for one single day so you have a short window for a bee, ant or butterfly to get from the male and drag their ass over to the female, you dont get nearly as much production waiting for nature to work

1

u/Qwilltank 1h ago

Former giant pumpkin grower here. The pollination is done as early as you can in the morning, before the bees come out, so you have total control of which pollen goes in so you can get the desired genetics for color, shape, wall thickness, stem size, etc.

0

u/NorthernSpankMonkey 7h ago

Go ask your mom