Pollinating megablooms

Giant tomatoes start with giant fused blossoms, or "megablooms". But the biggest megabloom won't do you any good if it doesn't get properly pollinated. Tomato blossoms normally self-pollinate without difficulty, but for some reason, big megablooms need a little help setting fruit. This is probably the most important thing that I learned last year, so pay attention...

Keep your eye out for larger than normal blossoms. A simple count of the green petals or "sepals" will give you an idea of how big your blossom is. Normal blossoms have 8. Anything with 12 or more sepals is good. I think last year's winner had 12 or 14. This is the biggest megabloom I've ever seen at 22 sepals.

The best time of day for pollinating is supposedly 10-4, but I've been successful doing this in the evening after work. First, you need to gather pollen from as many blossoms as you can find. With a vibrating electric toothbrush, gently vibrate the blossoms and catch the pollen as it falls out. Some people recommend using a lens from an old pair of sunglasses, but I've found with even the slightest breeze, the pollen tends to blow away. So I prefer a dark bowl to catch the pollen.

BTW, one person on a tomato forum said she gets about 75% success rate just vibrating the blossoms with the toothbrush, and not doing any of the following steps. I've been regularly vibrating the blossoms on all my eating tomatoes, and I seem to have set a larger than normal amount of green tomatoes.

Once you've collected the pollen, you need to prepare the blossom for pollination. The blossom should be receptive to pollinating as soon as the yellow part opens up. Don't wait too long, because the window of opportunity for pollination is only a few days. After vibrating off any pollen from the male yellow part, you want to remove the yellow to provide easy access to the female tip, or stigma. I just pinch them with my fingers, and they peel right off.

The emasculated blossom will look something like this. On a normal blossom, there will be a single pistil, and the stigma will be just a dot in the middle. But on a really good megabloom, it will form a long ridge, and may have multiple ridges, like this one.

With your finger, wipe the pollen out of the bowl until your finger tip is all chalked up.

Then gently dab the pollen onto the stigma. You don't have to push. The tip should be sticky, and just a gentle touch should coat it with pollen. If you look closely, you can see that the ridged tip of this one has been dusted with pollen.

If you do this correctly and the pollination takes, you'll see the tomato start growing after a few days to a week or so. Here's a nice megabloom that I apparently pollinated correctly, because it's growing.

This one was on a Big Zac that I had slated for growing eating tomatoes. But dang, that tomato is looking so good, I may need to repurpose this plant! It's already as big as anything that Fred grew last year, and it's only a few days old.