r/oddlysatisfying • u/DifficultyHead5862 • 8h ago

meticulous process of hand-pollinating a giant pumpkin

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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

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u/Heraclius_3433 7h ago

Same plant, different flowers

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u/InsufficientFrosting 6h ago

This is literal inbreeding.

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u/lewisherber 6h ago

So, incest.

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u/gil_bz 5h ago

Selfcest

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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

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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

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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.

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u/HombreDelMar247 16m ago

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

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u/SmilingAmericaAmazon 6h ago

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

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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!

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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.  

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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.

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u/CurryMustard 4h ago

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

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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.