Choosing of Your Fruit Trees: Have you thought about their Pollination needs?

Now that we have considered our zone/location, and what our specific soil and sun exposure may be we can now start looking at trees that would grow in the area we have in mind.

For us we picked out: apple, cherry, peach, pear, and plum tree varieties. But when we looked into buying them we realized we forgot to consider their pollination needs. Each tree would need a second tree of its kind for cross-pollination. So instead of 5 trees we now would need 10! That is a lot of fruit to harvest once the trees reach maturity. 

After looking at our space we had picked out for our trees we decided not to get the plum trees as we didn’t think we would have room for 10 but 8 would work.

Now that we were thinking about cross-pollination we realized if we were going to get 2 of each we wanted to be sure and get 2 different varieties of each (like Bing and a Rainier cherry tree) we wanted this not only for a variety of flavors but also for to help spread out the harvest load.  

This then lead us to realizing that each variety would have a different blooming time as well so we would need to make sure the trees we picked out would have somewhat overlapping blooms so that they would fertilize each other’s blooms, as that was the reason we needed 2 of each fruit tree.

What we thought would be an easy “just pick the fruit tree you like to eat” proses had a lot more research then we were prepared for.