When certain things confounded me beyond my limited mental capacity, I often turned to the wisdom of the parental figures that guided me along from childhood to adulthood. However, when querying the television for answers yielded no results, I was forced to ask the all-knowing Internet this slightly awkward question: “Father, where do baby fruits and vegetables come from?”
To save you young folks the hassle of having this conversation with your parental figures and to save parental figures from the embarrassment of having to explain this to your children, I will take it upon myself to explain plant reproduction in a manner that young people can understand. If you are a parental figure, you might want to tune out now or you may be shocked to find out what your kids already know about “the birds and the bees.”
The Sex Pistils:
According to wikipedia, the female reproductive part of a flower (hereby referred to as “her thingy”) is called a Gynoecium. In the plant world, being female carries with it a certain style and stigma. No, seriously, those are actual names of components for her thingy.
Making a stamen:
The male reproductive part of a flower is called a stamen (hereby referred to as “his thingy”). The long shaft is called a filament. On the filament’s tip is something called the anther, also known as the pollen sac. Now keep in mind that in the plant kingdom, the sac is at the TIP of the shaft, not the base. Got it?
Pollen, of course, is that powdery substance that a lot of people are allergic to. Sometimes wind carries pollen around, seemingly straight up your nose, and your immune system goes into overdrive. This small powdery “pollen” thing that gets all over your clothes, skin, face, and up your nose is actually plant spooge. You see, little baby fruits and vegetables happen when the mommy and daddy part of the plant really love each other and spooge from his thingy makes contact with the spooge receptors in her thingy. Got that?
Well, hang on, it gets weirder.
A lot of plant types have flowers that contain both a male and a female part. These hermaphrodites are referred to as “perfect flowers” because they can “get pregnant” by fscking themselves. Other plants like zucchini have separate male flowers and female flowers and getting the spooge from his thingy into her thingy requires a bit more help.
Let me explain further since I’m sure this all seems a bit confusing right now. Actually, think about it for a second – plant parts don’t usually move much. They just lay there doing nothing. So if you’re, say, a vegetable, how do you make magic happen? You’d do it the way pandas in the zoo do it – you get others to help you.
In the case of “perfect flowers,” the spooge doesn’t have to travel much so sometimes even a slight breeze is enough to shake the spooge from his thingy and into hers. This means that a hermaphrodite flower can get pregnant from a blow-job. There, I said it. For tomatoes grown inside greenhouses where breezes do not occur, people often shake the plants themselves or with devices called “vibrators.” No, this is not a joke – Hermie plants can get pregnant with the use of a vibrator!
For non-hermie “imperfect flowers,” pollination is a bit trickier. Many flowers offer something sweet in order to attract insects (usually bees). As the bees harvest this nectar, they can’t help but rub up against his thingy and get plant spooge all over their hair. When they subsequently visit a female flower, some of the spooge rubs off of their body and into her thingy. Keep in mind the next time you enjoy honey on your toast that your sweet-tooth had just been satisfied by bees, nature’s spooge bucket.
To recap, this article briefly discussed plant reproductive anatomy terminology with words like pistils, stamens, and pollen. This article also discussed the topical differences between perfect and imperfect flowers and the different ways that pollination occurs. Most of all, I hope this article has given you a new perspective into the the reproductive habits of fruits and vegetables. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a Q-Tip so I can jerk off a zucchini.
(Note: This article uses the term “spooge” 9 times. 10 if you count the previous sentence.)
