How to Plant Apple Orchards for Cross-pollination
Apple trees are not self-fruitful trees, which means that an apple variety will not be able to use pollen from its own cultivar to fertilize a tree. Apple orchards require cross-pollination among varieties of apple trees to set large, attractive fruit. Most growers rely on bees and other insects for cross-pollination. But in order to make the work of bees most effective, the growers must plant an orchard correctly. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
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Determine if your apple variety is an early-blooming apple tree, midseason blooming apple tree or a late-season blooming apple tree. When planting two types of apples trees for cross-pollination, the two types of trees must produce blossoms at the same time. Apples such as Idared are early-season bloomers. Golden Delicious apples produce blossoms during midseason. Rome apples are late-season bloomers.
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Determine which apples are compatible for cross-pollination. Apple nursery catalogs produce compatibility charts for selecting apples for cross-polination. Apples such as Winesap produce sterile pollen and cannot cross-pollinate with other trees. Some trees, such as Arkansas Black, will not produce with specific other trees, such as Liberty.
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Plant a row of pollinizer trees in between every four rows of regular apple trees in an orchard. Or plant a pollinizer in between every fifth tree in irregular rows of apple trees.
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Place buckets of crabapple branches in full bloom in solitary trees. Bees will pollinate the solitary tree using the pollen from the blossoms in the buckets. Hang these buckets of flowers when the king flowers open on the apple tree. The king flowers are the largest flowers in the apple blossom clusters. If they pollinate, they will produce the largest fruit.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit White flowering apple trees, covered the sun. image by petrovit from Fotolia.com
