Tom & Debbie wrote:

Speaking of open pollination, how far apart would be far enough to keep
cross-pollination from occurring in a garden for peppers and tomatoes?
Also, I've heard of placing bags around flower clusters to prevent
this...don't you need these flowers to be pollinated within their own plant
types?
debbie



I don't believe tomatoes will pollinate peppers or vice versa, although
I never took biology in school. All I know is what I learn by error and
trial, and there are a lot of things I haven't tried, so I still make a
lot of errors. There are probably people in this group who know
something about this, so I'll let them take it from there.

Tomatoes can be self-fertilized without the aid of pollinating insects.
This is how they're grown in greenhouses. The plants are pollinated
mechanically, by shaking the plant or the plant support. Not sure about
peppers, never tried them in a greenhouse, but they're in the same
family of plants (if that's the right terminology).

If the plants are pollinated by honeybees, they can fly up to two miles
from their hive for honey collection (and therefore pollination). I
suspect that once they find a honey source they work it for a while
before flying in another direction, so you don't have to really worry
about cross pollination in a 4 mile diameter region.

In my understanding, the bags around the flowers are used for seed
production (particularly hybrid seeds), and don't affect the fruit
directly except that if the bags prevent pollination there will be no
fruit. Hybrids are produced by taking the pollen from one of the hybrid
parents, probably on a paintbrush or something like that, and brushing
it onto the stamen of the other parent, on which the anthers have been
removed to prevent self-pollination. The flower is bagged to prevent
pollination by other sources. There are probably other methods also,
since that one is labor intensive. Just think about removing anthers
from tomato blossoms (without missing any) and brushing pollen into
them.

The only fruit that I know is affected by the type of pollen is corn.
The supersweet and sugar enhanced corn types are incompatible. If one
pollinates the other the result is less tender and/or tasty than either
one. Fortunately, corn pollination can be controlled by either physical
separation or by timing the plantings. I have heard numbers for the
required physical separation of corn types of anywhere from 100 feet to
1/2 mile. Clearly impractical for the home gardener.