How do I hand pollinate squash, pumpkins and cucumbers?

We thank Jeanine Starkenberg in Venus, Texas for sending a fabulous video of how she and her grandkids Brody and Piper pollinated their pumpkin patch by transferring pollen from the male flowers to the female ones!

Hand pollination may be necessary if there aren’t enough pollinators around to do the job naturally. Or, you might also have to lend a hand if you’ve had to cover your plants with row cover to keep out insects like squash vine borers, thus limiting access by pollinators as well.

If the flowers aren’t properly pollinated, very few seeds will be produced, which will inhibit the fruit from developing properly. Squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, and many other fruit of all types, produce a lot of seeds in each fully-developed fruit. So a lower pollination rate will mean a lower number of seeds, which will mean smaller fruit, or maybe none at all. The fruit may start to develop, but without enough seeds, will remain small, or even be dropped by the plant to conserve resources, before it gets very far along.

Hand pollination ensures that quite a bit of pollen is transferred from a male flower to a female flower, and more pollen means fertilization of more embryos, which will lead to more seeds and a better reason for the plant to expend resources on that fruit.