If you’re growing tomatoes in your Aerogarden hydroponic garden, you’ll need to pollinate the flowers if you want the plant to produce fruit.
Pollinating is an easy (and even kind of fun) process. If you want the simplest tool for pollinating Aerogarden tomatoes, check out the Bee the Bee pollinator. We’ll explore other pollination methods, too.
Once flowers appear, here is a video showing the process you should follow.
Aerogarden Pollinating: Why and How
Tomatoes are self-pollinating, but since there is no wind movement in a home garden, you need to help the plant along. There are a variety of ways to pollinate your Aerogarden tomatoes.
You can choose one of these to try out, or do a bit of each.
Shake Your Plants
The simplest way to pollinate flowers is to give the plant a gentle shake once a day. This can be done with enough force to move the pollen within the flower but not enough to damage the plant.
Grab the base of the plant’s stem near the Aerogarden capsule, and give it a brisk shake side to side. You may even seen some pollen granules launch into the air when you do this.
Set up a Fan
Another strategy is to set up a fan for a couple of hours a day near the garden to simulate wind. This can also help to pollinate the flowers.
If you have the Aerogarden installed in a drafty room, that can help to get some airflow going too. This might be enough to pollinate your tomatoes in certain circumstances.
Use an Aerogarden Tool (or Toothbrush)
If you’re looking for a fun way to pollinate the flowers, you can use a tool called “Be the Bee” that Aerograden makes specifically for pollinating Aerogarden plants.
The tool looks like a bee, and vibrates to distribute pollen most efficiently. It essentially simulates the process that a real bee might use to pollinate a flower in the wild. Using it, you pretend to be a bee, gently tapping the flowers and distributing the pollen around.
As an alternative, you can also use a toothbrush to do this if you don’t want to buy the tool. But especially if you have kids, they’ll probably love the creative bee design of the Bee the Bee.
If you pollinate the flowers correctly, they will turn into fruit and you’ll have fresh tomatoes!
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