I’ve been thinking about the strawberry flowers recently and wondering how the flower turns into the fruit. Tomatoes are self-pollinating. With my cucumbers, I had to pollinate the female flowers with pollen from the male flowers by hand (see here and here and especially the comments here). So I started to wonder about the strawberries. I’m pretty desperate for them to be a success, since I’m not so convinced of the success of some of the other plants out there.
This morning I Googled “strawberry pollination” and got quite a few hits. One I especially liked was this site, which talks about how strawberries are basically self-pollinating, but need help doing it. This other site discusses growing strawberries in a greenhouse, and how they have found bumblebees to be the best solution to their pollination needs.
Now I love being on the 3rd floor (fourth if you consider that the garage is really the ground level) of my building– no rabbits, no squirrels, no mice, etc. However, it seems that we’re too high for most insects that do any sort of substantial pollination work. We have plenty of mosquitoes and spiders to catch them, and occasionally we have wasps, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bee this high. And I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work to buy some bumblebees to keep out on our tiny balcony 
So back to hand-pollination it is! I went out with a paint brush this morning and just sort of swiped around each flower to disturb the pollen and get it on the pistils (I hope I used that botany terminology correctly!). The nice thing is that I don’t have to worry about male and female flowers with strawberries.
I’ll update about how the hand-pollination works!
I’d love to hear how your pollination project is going.
I purcahsed some plants for the first time. I think they were tristar and I got them from lowes. i planned to grow them indoors under a light and let my little ones observe the process.
The initial growth was great. We saw lots of flowers come then all of the sudden the flowers all died. The leaves are still growing but no more flowers??
I dont know much about growing berries so I couldn’t tell if it was a disease or perhaps its a pollination issue.
I picked up 2 small plants today at a little road side green house. I still want to figure this out. I’m not sure what variety they are but perhaps I can try to polinate them myself.
L
Hi LW,
So far, I haven’t seen results either way (berries or dead flowers) besides the petals falling off the flowers after a while. I’ll definitely keep posting about the progress of the strawberries, though!
I hope that your new strawberry plants work out for you, though!
hi i just realized about pollination as well, im growing a strawberry outside it has flowers and now i have to hand pollinate with what u said, ill do same and i hope i get strawberries coming hehe, im also growing peppers i have to google that to see whats up with that lol well thanx for the follow up any new findings will help me out as well. ill save ur site add. thanx ciaos and good luck with that
hey everyone well my strawberry plants had 1 flower in each and lasted about two to three days and now the pedals are falling off what do i do i have searched everywere and i cannot find any answer that will help me. i am growing watermelons ,tomatos, strawberries and moss roses . please help some one.
Excellent link to gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/book/chap7/strawberry.html. I had been wondering if the netting I had erected would affect the development of fruit. Now to get a soft and small paint brush for a daily rub!