Fruit Trees:Fruitfulness

— Why Fruit Trees Fail to Bear —

Slightly Wild Garden Services

Glen Buschmann  •  revised 2016

Flowers

If your trees are not flowering, you many be overpruning your trees.  New growth in a tree, (including “watershoots”) can become fruit-bearing in one to two years.  Branches which angle from 45° up to 45° down are best for fruit production; a vertical shoot can be redirected.  (For cherries and nuts, more vertical is o.k.)

Weather

Damaging cold during the winter is not a common problem in Western Washington.  However, rain and frost at bloom time can noticibly reduce a tree’s yield — freezing because of actual flower damage, rain because pollinators are not active.  There is little the home orchardist can do except note the weather and wait for next year.

Pollen

Most fruit trees need to cross-pollinate with a different variety of the same type of fruit tree — apple with apple, pear with pear, cherry with cherry.  The two varieties must bloom at about the same time and the cross-pollinator must produce viable pollen.  Peaches, apricots, pie-cherries, and European plums are self fertile.

If your trees were blooming and the weather adequate, but you still have poor fruitset, next bloomtime place branches from a pollinator tree in a bucket of water near the unbearing tree.  Bees will visit both varieties.  If all other factors remain the same and fruiting improves, consider planting (or grafting) a cross-pollinator tree.

Bees

Even if all other factors are in play — the right weather, the right varieties, and healthy well-pruned trees — a tree will not bear if bees have not pollinated the flowers.

That said, bees in the home orchard may be the least important factor — a suburban environment usually has enough bees for fruit trees.  A dozen mason or mining bees can pollinate an average apple or plum tree.  Most fruit trees (except cherries) produce ten times more flowers than are needed for a good crop.

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Glen Buschmann

Slightly Wild Garden Services

olyslightlywild.blogspot.com

360/  352-9009  •  gbwestoly@gmail.com

PO Box 11464 • Olympia, WA 98508