Controlled Pollination is a horticultural practice that has been a part of the tree fruit industry for close to eighty years. The ability to effectively supplement natural pollination in orchards had long been the dream of orchardists. Around 1930, during the beginning years of the Great Depression, farm advisors in Washington State, recognizing the need to improve upon the economic efficiency of apple orchards, advised growers to remove less profitable varieties of apples from their orchards. The farm advisors recommended lower yielding and lower value apples with blocks containing Red Delicious and Winesaps. After the trees were in their fourth to fifth leaf, it was discovered that while Red Delicious did a good job of pollinizing the Winesaps, the Winesaps were not pollinizing the Red Delicious. The reason for this was that the Winesap apple was a triploid, and could not be used to pollinize any other variety of apple.
Inadvertently, the farm advisors, by recommending that Winesap be planted with Red Delicious created a large scale cross-pollination crisis, which resulted in inadequate fruit set and devastating financial problems for many growers in central Washington. The need to find a solution to the problem of inadequate cross-pollination in these orchards, was the force that brought Mina and Vernon Firman and Leo Antles, independently to find a solution of the pollination dilemma. Working with research information that was previously undertaken by Cornell University, it took many years of trial and error and hard work by these industry pioneers to develop the ability to produce the high quality pollens and application methods that orchardists have available today. BEGINNINGS OF CONTROLLED POLLINATION When the practice of Controlled Pollination was in its infancy, housewives in the Wenatchee Washington area were employed in the spring to gather apple flowers in orchards from which pollen could be extracted. There are a number of archived photographs of these housewives working off of orchard ladders with coffee cans strapped to their hips with screens over the top. In these photographs, the housewives can be seen picking individual flowers from apple trees, and then rubbing the flowers over the screen to remove the yellow anthers. The anthers were then cured until the pollen dehisced from the anther.
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