Why Gardeners Should Use Paintbrushes On Their Tomatoes

If you’re growing tomatoes this year, you’ll probably be hoping for a healthy, plentiful bounty. 

To achieve that, gardening experts reccomend taking a paintbrush to the plant to help it self-pollinate.

What is self-pollination? 

It means a plant can reproduce from pollen produced by the same plant.

Tomatoes have both female and male pollen, meaning they have all they need to self-pollinate.

Bees, breeze, and birds, along with other pollinators, can help to get those different kinds of pollen across the plant. Tomato pollen is quite heavy and sticky, so the pollen usually needs to hitch a lift.

But if you grow tomatoes in a greenhouse, where insects and winds are rare (Monty Don advises keeping tomatoes in a greenhouse ’til the end of May), or if you just want to give your plants a boost, supercharging that process can be done manually. 

This can help to turn tomato flowers into plentiful, healthy fruit.

How can I hand-pollinate a tomato with a paintbrush?

“Brush pollen by hand with a cotton swab or small paintbrush, transferring it from the anthers to the stigma,” advises Gardening Know-How. 

Try to do this on warm, sunny days when the flowers are open; late morning to early afternoon is ideal.

Repeat every two or three days while the tomato flowers last.

But those aren’t the only ways to help. If you don’t have a toothbrush, you can “lightly tap or shake the flowers when fully open to aid pollen transfer within the flower,” the RHS advise.

You can also place the back of an electric toothbrush head against the flowers of a tomato flower to shake the pollen out.

“Gently hold the flower if necessary, use the non-bristle head of the toothbrush, and touch the flower in just one spot for one to two seconds,” enthusiastic gardener “Farmer Jeff,” said on Instagram.

Any other tips?

For a greater tomato yield, Gardener’s World also advises “sideshooting”.

This means gardeners should “pinch out the sideshoots that appear between the main stem and leaves every few days,” allowing more energy to travel to the fruit. 

Potassium-rich fertilisers, like those made with comfrey leaves, are a great start, they added.