Pollination ~ when pollen is spread from one flower to another via different agents such as wind, insects, or birds. It's a beautiful thing!

Our fruit trees, are primarily pollinated by insects like bees. Pollination is how many plants (and our fruit trees), are able to reproduce. 

When a flower is successfully pollinated, it produces fruit (containing it's fertile seeds). The end goal of the tree is so have someone/thing take that fruit and help to plant its seeds elsewhere.

Pollination is key since if a fruit tree is not pollinated, it will not produce fruit. In general, you will need:

• two different varieties of two different trees,
• that bloom roughly at the same time, 
• to be planted near each other (between 50-100FT is ideal) for cross-pollination to happen & for the trees to produce fruit.

These trees generally need to be the same species; an apple will not pollinate a pear and vice versa.  So, you will need trees of the same species but different varieties as two trees of the same variety would be genetically identical (grafting is like cloning).

Our website includes information on each tree; you can click on “GROWING SPECS” to view each trees’ pollination requirements.  Please reference this when you are making decisions. Most of our trees require another tree of another variety to produce fruit! We do have some partially self-pollinating trees (these will produce some fruit by themselves), and a few self-pollinating (will produce a decent crop on their own). Having two or more trees of two or more varieties will always produce more/larger fruit.

Some of our apple trees are triploid which means they have sterile pollen. This means that they can be pollinated by another variety but they cannot pollinate other trees. In order for a non-triploid tree to be pollinated, a third non-triploid variety will need to be planted.

Generally, different species of trees will not pollinate each other, so an apple and a pear will not cross-pollinate. The main exception to this is European and Asian pears (they will pollinate each other). There are a few random exceptions, but it's best to err on more pollination options than less with fruit trees.

Keep In Mind:

• Apples and crabapples will pollinate each other since they are the same species
• Crabapples are excellent pollinators as they have so many blossoms
• European and Asian pears will pollinate each other
• European and Japanese plums will not pollinate each other
• Sweet and Sour cherries will not pollinate each other

We generally categorize our apple and pear trees as having an ‘early,’ ‘middle,’ or ‘late’ bloom time. Trees in the same and adjacent groups will pollinate each other, but you may have issues if you expect an early and a late bloomer to cross, especially in unusually cold years when bloom times tend to shorten.

Sweet cherries and plums are the trickiest species to get good pollination as 'early', 'middle', and 'late' aren't exacting enough. Here is a helpful chart for sweet cherry pollination. We grow cherry varieties that are almost all cross-compatible if you get another variety of the cultivars we grow if it is not self-pollinating. And plums are even more finicky, you can check this pollination chart for more details. Toka is a favourite pollinator as it's a hybrid American-Asian and pollinates both.

General Seedling Pollination Guidelines:

For seedlings requiring pollination, like paw paws, we recommend planting in groups of three for optimal pollination, and to ensure if, for example, 10 years down the road something happens to one of the 3, you'll still have pollination.

Pollinizer vs Pollinator: technically, insects are pollinators, and trees themselves are pollinizers to each other (a source of pollen). However colloquially, we (most nurseries and general public) use pollinator in place of pollinizer, though it is incorrect. As it is so common a mistake that we all know what we mean, we will let it slide and stick with the masses in this case, as there are more important problems to solve and updates to make!