Learn how to improve harvests in your backyard orchard.
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Pollination Groups
Before diving in and ordering your fruit trees, you need to take some time to understand how your short list varieties will pollinate. It is pollination that is going to produce a harvest and for most home orchards, your trees will be 2 years or more from producing their first harvest, so let’s get them set up for success.
Poor Orchard Harvests
A lot of the poor harvests in an orchard comes from self-sterility. That is where a tree is self-sterile, it can’t set fruit with trees of the same variety planted nearby. The tree has a mechanism that prevents it from inbreeding with itself and setting fruit. If you have listened to the seed saving podcasts then we talk about plants that are quite happy self-pollinating like tomatoes. But apples and other pome fruits like pears and quince, generally like to outcross or share pollen with another variety to produce fruit as do stone fruits like plums and sweet cherries.
If you already have an orchard, lucky you! But if you see that your trees continue to drop young fruit, then it might be self-sterility causing the problem.
Stone Fruit
Some fruit trees like apricots, nectarines, sour cherries and peaches are generally self-pollinating and don’t need another variety of the tree to pollinate and produce fruit. But, I found in my home orchard in Utah that the peach trees produced so much more when they had other varieties growing nearby. If you care short on space for your backyard orchard and you like these fruits, then apricots, peaches, nectarines, and sour cherries or pie cherries are a great start.
Cherries, pears and plums usually have multi-grafted trees available. This means they have different varieties on the same tree. This is great for a suburban homesteader wanting to grow more variety in the space. If you have a bigger lot, then consider growing 2 different varieties of plum let’s say to help aid pollination and having better harvests.
Improving Pollination
Let’s hop back to the fruit trees that need another variety and talk through an example. Let’s say that I have Jonagold apple trees and none of them are setting fruit and there isn’t any other variety within 50 ft of them, poor pollination is very likely the problem.
Often, much loved heritage or heirloom apple trees are pollen sterile. Jonagold, Gravenstein, Belle de Boskoop, Baldwin, Greening, Ashmead’s Kernel, Winesap, and my Bramley’s Seedling are all pollen sterile. This means that they make unreliable pollen sources for other trees. They’re like that super flaky friend that might show up to the party but you can’t be too sure. You might see this in the plant or seed catalog as being a triploid apple which means they have 3 sets of chromosomes but to you and me, it means that they are not a good source of pollen to other varieties. They are very receptive of pollen from other varieties of apples.
Don’t be discouraged if all your planned varieties are triploid trees. They do have some benefits if you can grow other pollinator varieties nearby or find a tree which has been grafted with different varieties together. A triploid tree often has large crops, display good disease resistance, and grow vigorously and tend to be the ones that survive tough winters.
Many apples are diploid varieties, means they have 2 sets of chromosomes and these trees are great pollen sources for your pollen sterile varieties. An unusual prolific pollinator of apple trees is the crabapple. Many an old homestead orchard would have a seemingly random crabapple planted. Those homesteaders knew that the crabapples bloomed over a long period of time that helped to pollinate their apple trees.
Understanding Pollination Groups
Many plant catalogs have a pollination group listed. For apples, these are numbers 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, and 6. For the best success of pollination of your orchard, would want varieties that are in the same pollination group or, if you have different pollination groups, grow a long blooming crabapple near your orchard.
Lets go through an example. Let’s say that you want to grow Empire apples. They are in pollination group 3. You also want to grow Gravenstein (pollination group 1), Honeycrisp (group 4) and, McIntosh (group 2). You would get better harvests and pollination by growing a crabapple in your backyard within 50 ft of your orchard to help ensure that as each variety blossoms, pollen from the crabapple will pollinate those flowers, producing fruit for you to harvest.
Now, around my neck of the woods, Northern Spy (pollination group 5) is popular and delicious. I could grow other varieties in the same pollination group like Gilpin, Isaac Newton’s (which quite frankly as a scientist I should probably grow anyway for my love of physics and chemistry), Pine Golden Pippin, Somerset Redstreak or Yarlington Mill which are popular hard cider apples in England. Or I could grow Golden Hornet which is a crabapple.
Choosing What To Grow In Your Orchard
Its easy to want to buy all the things but when you are short on space you need to think carefully about the varieties you are choosing to grow. Are you a person who wants apples for fresh eating rather than cooking? Are you a cooker of apples rather than eating fresh? Or are you more into homebrew and cider? How you plan to use your fruit is going to help guide you to what varieties to grow.
Let’s go back to the Northern Spy example. If I didn’t want cider and I just want fresh eating apples, then there is little point growing the Somerset Redstreak or Yarlington Mill apples, I should focus on growing an eating apple like the Pine Golden Pippin or Gilpin with my Northern Spy instead. If you are short of space, it is much better to focus on varieties that are in the same pollination group.
Learn More
Dig in and learn more about growing fruit in a home garden in these related posts:
Designing a Permaculture Orchard: How to Grow More Food In Your Backyard
How to Plant a Fruit Tree Guild
40 Brilliant Berries To Grow In Your Garden
What do you want in your orchard? Let me know over in the Facebook group
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