Pollination needs consideration

While most annual vegetables will do just fine being self-pollinated, this is only true for a handful of fruits and even most of the fruits in that small handful will do better when they are given an ideal mate for cross pollination.

For some trees that need cross pollination it is as easy as planting another tree that bears the same fruit within 100 feet of it. For other fruit trees, like apples and Japanese plums, they really do need to be planted near different trees with similar characteristics. For example two Honeycrisp apple trees planted next to each other produce fruit that is smaller and less crispy than if you planted a Honeycrisp with a Golden Delicious.

In some cases, these cross-pollination needs are related to traits that improve the quality of each trees fruit. However some cross-pollination needs are related to the time of year or soil temperature that certain sub-types flower. This is especially true with apples.

I have to admit that when I planted my first orchard, I largely ignored the suggested pairings for the cross-pollination of the four apple trees I bought. The biggest problem was that all four apple trees bloomed at different times. There were many springs where one apple tree would be starting to drop its unpollinated blossoms just two days after the next tree was opening its blossoms. This ultimately meant I would only get a tiny amount of fruit. The only salvation for two of these trees was the fact that I had a neighbor within the range that a bee was willing to fly that had a crab apple tree, which could get the job done.

Later in this book we will go into the specific pollination requirements for the different types of trees as well as some of my personal recommendations that I have grown or seen grown in orchards that I have visited. The thing that is most germane to you planning what you want to grow and how many trees you want to plant is to consider both the distance as well as the number of trees you want to plant of a certain type.

You need to think like a bee. If you spend an afternoon in the garden or orchard watching bees buzz from flower to flower, they don’t just jump one flower on an apple tree right in front of you to the flower of an apple tree 50 feet away. They tend to move from one flower to the flower closest to it. Once they’ve exhausted their efforts on a certain level of flowers, they move to a flowering tree that is close to it.

This essentially means that the farther apart you plant two cross-pollinators, the more total trees you will need to plant in order for all of them to be cross pollinated. The general rule of thumb is to plant three trees that all have complimentary cross-pollination characteristics within 50 feet of each other. While this works for many types of fruit trees it can cause problems in others, especially apples and plums which might only have one or two suggested cross-pollinated companions.

If you want three different types of fruit from three different sub-types of trees, this is certainly a good idea. In my personal experience, I try to work things out in sets of four, or more aptly two sets of two. For example, Honeycrisp apples prefer to be cross-pollinated by Red Rome and Golden Delicious. Instead of planting one Honeycrisp, one Red Rome and one Golden Delicious, I chose to plant two Honeycrisp and two Golden Delicious trees. This way I know that if some random storm uproots one of the trees with straight-line winds, that there is still another that can handle pollinating the other two. I’m not forced to buy another tree next year and then wait three to five years for it to become mature enough to produce flowers.