Emasculating Flowers

Note: Best to bring females in and remove early flowers and let the bush set a large group of flowers at the same time to emasculate.

1. Best to emasculate stage four flowers. Fully elongated but not open.

2. Remove any flowers that are stage 5 or open so that they won’t be confused with pollinated flowers. It is possible that some blueberry varieties are self-fertile.

3. Using a tweezers pinch a fold in the corolla and rip a section off. The style should be fully elongated and the stigma at the very end of the corolla. Be careful not to pinch the style/stigma.

4. Continuing removing sections of the corolla until it is completely removed

5. You may need to hold the bud with your left hand to stabilize it so you don’t pull the whole bud off.

6. Once the corolla is removed carefully remove the stamens. In the past they removed all filaments and anthers. I just removed the anthers and part of the filaments as I found removing it all led me to pop whole buds off.

7. Keep track of how many buds you emasculate.