Eco-Farm: An Acres U.S.A. Primer — Lesson 2: The Forgiveness of Nature, Part 4
This is an excerpt from Charles Walters’ Eco-Farm — An Acres U.S.A. Primer, available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore at bookstore.acresusa.com. Read more excerpts from this book using the category “Eco-Farm” (https://members.acresusa.com/magazine-features/eco-farm/).
14. Pollination
Everyone knows the bee can’t fly according to the laws of aerodynamics. But the bee does not know this, so it does fly, delivering 225 wingbeats per second. These wingbeats help the wind stir pollen and make their contribution to the sex act in plants.
When pollen reaches a stigma, it causes a tiny, thin root to grow—the pollen tube. This tube plunges down through the stigma, down the style, into the ovary. There it joins a tiny organ called an ovule, and from all this will grow a seed if fertilization is right with God and the world.
Bees are not alone in their work. Insects also pollinate, as do the winds.
All insects are not equally effective in pollination work because of wingbeat and size and distance capability. Here, nevertheless, is a table giving wingbeats per second and how far their efforts take them per second.
15. The grand diversity
Any plant that can achieve fertilization with its own pollen is said to be self-compatible. Many plants do not accept their own pollen—the so-called self-incompatible plants.
The grand diversity in nature again reveals itself. Some plants produce fruit, albeit no seeds, notably the banana. Some plants are sterile—that is, they produce no fruit in one case, or seed in another. These plants can be reproduced only from cuttings or other parts of the mother plant.
A few plants are hermaphrodites. That is to say, they are both male and female complete in the same flower. In botany they say the flower is perfect. Plants also commonly have male and female parts on different flowers. Cucumbers and squash provide good examples.
When male and female are in fact on the same plant—pumpkins, corn, squash—the plant is called monoecious, from the Greek for “one house.” When male and female are in fact on different plants in the same area, the term is dioecious. It is a dioecious plant. This is what the Arabs discovered when they found they had to plant male and female date trees in the same grove.
With a few more terms, the lexicon is complete. A plant that can pollinate itself is self-pollinated. A plant that is fertilized with pollen from another plant is cross-pollinated. When a flower from one variety is fertilized with pollen from another variety, it has been hybridized. As new seeds are produced from this mating, they are called hybrids. It isn’t exactly the same as with the mule, which has no pride of ancestry or hope of progeny. Hybrids can be planted back, albeit without good results. Hybridization makes it possible for seed companies to keep farmers coming back for machine counted, high priced seed instead of growing their own.
