Steve, I do agree that "helper pollen" might work. I was talking with Judith F.about this and cut pistil pollination once. I was curious what was actually happening to make these methods work. Now I don't remember what she said about the helper pollen, I'm sure I wrote it down somewhere......
But as a relative newbie in the subject, I had thought the cut pistil approach was merely to reduce the length of the pistil that pollen must travel through. It seemed logical to me that if I was pollinating with pollen from a short pistil species, that pollen would be genetically predisposed to not need to travel a long distance. Pollinating onto a long pistil, that that pollen might not traverse the entire length of the long pistil to fertilize the ovary. Not so, says Judith. The reason for cut pistil pollination is solely to (hopefully) facilitate fertilization of incompatible (or somewhat incompatible) pollen, and has nothing to do with making a shorter distance for pollen to travel. And where I was thinking a cut pistil might then be a half or quarter of its original length.... wrong again. Judith says to cut it as short as possible, like a millimeter or less.
