One of the many prepping tasks that Spice and I did today was to purchase and plant an apple tree in our yard in town.
We have two other apple trees, and frankly this third tree is going to mean that in a few years, we are going to have apples coming out our ears at harvest time. (I hope that’s not as uncomfortable as it sounds!)
SO… why did we do it?
One word. Pollination.
One of the things people who are planting fruit trees (and some other plants) need to pay attention to which types of trees pollinate which other types. For example, neither of our two apple trees we currently have planted are self-pollinators, which means they depend upon each other (or another compatible apple tree in the area) to cross-pollinate with.
We planted a compatible pair to start with… but… what happens to our apple crop if one of the two fails in an ice storm or dies for some other reason? Since there are no other apple trees nearby in bee range, we would be out of luck.
SO… today we added a self-polinating tree that also pollinates both of our other trees. The new plant, a Golden Delious, gives us redundancy both when it comes to pollination as well as an extra backup plant should something happen to one of our other two trees.
It’s located on the side of our yard, away from the other two as the wind blows, but near enough to be of use “as the bee flies”.
There are a lot of choices out there, one thing we are paying attention to is to not only have trees that have flowers that come out at the same time, but also flowers of about the same color, since bees are known to be color sensitive, This articles from the Department of Primary Industries – New South Wales in Australia states “Research conducted in the United States and at Orange in NSW has shown that bees, when out foraging apple blossoms, tend to stay with the same colour flower and fly past a different colour, especially if the blossom colours are very different, such as deep red or white with a tinge of pink.”
I love how UK English spells “color” as “colour”.
BTW, I was doing research as to whether we could plant a Crabapple tree and have it be useful as a pollinator when I saw this.
Today we stopped by our outstanding local greenhouse and picked up our Golden Delicious tree and a bag of composted manure. She had previously dug the hole after checking to make sure there were no buried utilities where she was digging (CLICKY), and proceeded to plant.
Here’s Spice’s take on this project:
If you only have room for one tree (or two if you’re a ‘two is one’ kind of prepper), look for self-pollinating varieties. They are rare in apples (the Golden Delicious does some, but even so does better with a compatible partner; crabapples are and also pollinate most any other apple but are not good for fresh eating and tend to leave a messy yard with lots of drops), absent in some species, and common in others (many nice peaches and cherries).
Good producers put this important information on the tree’s (or bush’s) tag.
Most sources I’ve seen suggesting mutual pollinators within fifty feet of one another.
Instead of that fencing to deer-proof your young trees, you should look into Tree Tubes. They prevent browsing, are usable for several years, and act as a small, local greenhouse encouraging more growth.
First, thank you for your reply!
I’m not exactly sure what product you are referring to by Tree Tubes. If you mean the plastic tubes that protect the trunk of the tree, we tried those… the deer eating the bark isn’t the problem, they eat off all the leaves and the trees dies. We lost almost all of our trees in the first planting because they were eaten entirely down to just a stick in the ground.
If you are talking about the seedling protectors, those are great for small plants, but we are planting trees that are already 6-8 feet tall with brach width as much as 6 feet wide… the tree in the pictures is about 8 feet tall at it’s tallest branch (i laid it down in the back of my truck and it the top part curled on the tailgate, when placed passenger front to driver rear in the bed…
We’ve actually had deer tear down the fencing once to get to a tree… it went through a 6 foot high fence held up by steel t-posts… they get pretty aggressive unfortunately.
Fencing is a real pain, and expensive… fortunately we had somebody who had just recently removed all of his fencing around his trees (they had reached a height they didn’t need it) and wanted he wanted to get the fencing off his place, so he gave us 8 of the fencing rings and all the t-posts to put them up… several hundred dollars worth of fencing supplies, all we had to do was go pick it up. That helped, a lot.
Yes, I was referring to the plastic tubes. Mine are about 6′ tall and will protect the tree until it starts to grow out of the tube. But, we’re comparing apples and oranges. My trees are either bare root or damp root, 2-4′ tall, well pruned so that when I plant them, I drive in a piece of rebar, put on a 1/2″ PVC pipe about 6′ long, and then put the tree tube around the seedling and attach it to the PVC. Holds up to wind, rain, snow and deer.
When the tree grows out of the tube, the leaves will be 6′ above the ground to start with. If you leave the tube on for a while longer, you can eventually prune the tree so that the lowest limbs are 6′ off the ground, and less inviting to the deer.
Starting with a tree that has a 6′ spread, you would have to use fencing of some sort.
Ray
Outstanding!
Good stuff, good info.
You’ve made me want to try planting some trees that way as a compare/contrast to how we are doing ours now.
I’m now on a mission to check it out!