Tomato Sex

Hello Everyone,
Here’s a shamefully overdue update. I hope everyone is great!

Late last fall, a lobsterman came into my office holding a small plant. “Lizah, I found this growin’ in my compost heap. Seeing as how you don’t have any children or pets, I thought you could use a little more responsibility to get you into that mindset. Would you mind taking care of this for me to see if it will live through the winter?”

I was speechless. Here was this good natured, well-respected lobsterman in my office holding what appeared to be a marijuana plant and asking me to cultivate it for him! I’ve been asked to do a lot of things on this island, but becoming an illegal foster parent was most certainly not one of them. With much hesitation in my voice, I asked him if he had glaucoma… He took one look at the plant and busted out laughing. “Deah, this is a tomato plant!”

Beyond relieved (and embarrassed), I grabbed it from him and took care of it until I left for the Grand Canyon in January. Before I left, however, I gave it back to him with instructions of what to do and left it up to him to keep it alive. When I got back in early March, he came storming into my office: “Lizah, the tomato plant (*snicker*) has flowers on it! What should we do, seeing as how there aren’t any bees out.?!”

So, I invited myself over for dinner that night to take a look at this tomato plant and sure enough, it had flowers all over it. Pollination was necessary to take it to the next step, so we discussed various methods of doing so and quickly came to the conclusion that hand pollination might be the only way. Some sources recommended shaking the plant to disperse the pollen, but that just seemed a little aggressive, so we looked into other ways (on the internet) and found the title: “Pollinating Greenhouse Tomatoes with Vibrators.”

We looked at one another and it was settled, that was the method we were going to try…but where would we find the right vibrator for the job? Well, after a few phone calls where we half-attempted to explain hand pollination via a tomato vibrator, we finally had success! “How about trying an electric toothbrush?,” someone skeptically suggested. Yes!

The experiment then began. We very carefully placed the “tomato vibrator” behind each of the flowers to release the pollen and I kid you not… Right after we finished with the last flower, the whole plant wilted… no doubt from exhaustion. We gave it some water, and hoped for the best.

Yesterday, I ate my first cherry tomato of the year.