I started an orchard with semi-dwarf trees of different types and I lined up the trees by pollination groups. In other words if I planted a tree in pollination group 1 the tree next to it would be either in pollination group 1 or 2. Then as I kept planting I worked up the groups until I reached 6 and then worked my way back down. The result is each tree as a neighboring tree of the same or next pollination group. After a few years of doing this I have an orchard which seems to have no rhyme or reason to the layout. Pollination groups don’t necessarily bear fruit at the same time so when its time to pick apples one has to wander around the orchard to find the ones that are ripe vs the traditional orchard where each row is typically the same apple and bears all at once. Has anyone else done this or noticed a difference with pollination groups and orchard layout?
Yes. Get you a Chestnut Crab. Chip bud it with Indian Magic Crab and Pear{Plum} Leaf crab. Make enough for every 25 yards of your orchard. All your pollination needs are met. Then you can plant by harvest date and never worry about it. Here is a great link on pollinators:
How much area does your orchard cover?
I use a couple of different main pollinators instead of trying to group the apples into pollination groups. I did this for a couple of reasons. I did this mainly because if I do not like the way a particular apple taste, grows or the way it lasts, apple tree dies, etc. I am not locked into that pollination group. More varieties and diversity overall. That’s just my thinking. So far it has worked out well for me here in my orchard.
Probably a little more than an acre. The rows have twenty feet between them and the trees are spaced about 18 feet apart.
That’s a nice chart. Thanks. Makes a lot of sense and I’ll probably start to gravitate more to this method as I add more trees.
I just don’t think it is necessary at all in Michigan to worry about pollinators at all. We have wild crab apples of all sorts everywhere. Bees often travel a mile between trees. I bet there are 100,000 crab apples within a mile radius of my house, probably a lot more than that.
Worry about the pollinizers instead. Alber orchards keeps a few bee hives in the back corner of their 20 acre orchard. I have a wild flower meadow.
Just saw this posted on another site, figured it might be appreciated here:
I don’t know much about apples, but the chart seemed pretty handy.
Nice chart. On PG1 low chills, Galacia and Elah are superb partners that produce an apple/crab around Yates size. Both are 200 chill types.
Weather and numbers of bees are much more important to me.
Thankfully mobile bee colonies are very prevalent here. To the point finding rogue nests of bees is not surprising at all.
That 10’s of thousands of mostly domestic bees are hitting our Red Maples during a cold January is encouraging.