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Planting orchard

 
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Hello! My husband and I will be planting pur very first orchard this spring and we are both excited. But I'm wondering if I need to plant like trees together? There will be 12 trees in our orchard, 4 apples, 2 cherries, 2 apricots, 2 peaches and 2 mulberries. Do I need to plant all the apples together and all the peaches together and so on. Or can I plant an apple, then peach, then cherry?

We have a 6000 sqft space fenced in and half is for orchard half for garden. We want to plant in rows for ease of access but I'm not sure if it's better to group like trees together for pollination or if it really matters. Any insight would be appreciated!
 
pollinator
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Grouping them would improve pollination. Is there any reason not to group them?
 
pollinator
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They can definitely be alternated. Just don’t put them more than 100foot away from the other pollinator. Lots of recommendation are something like this. PAN  PAN pear apple nitrogen fix. The pear and apple can be switched to whatever. In theory this could mean a pest won’t find both pears or whatever.
 
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Hi Hollybeth,
I think skipping a tree or two is probably still close enough for pollination. Stefan Sobkowiak out of Canada does it in his orchard and it is doing well. Also, since the entire space you are planting is less than a quarter acre (if I did my math right), I don't think you will have any problems. If you were going to be planting hundreds of trees across multiple acres you might not want to put a pear tree on each end of a row :)

Have you purchased these yet? I just wanted to mention that certain apple tree varieties pollinate each other better than others. Most places you buy them from will have this information available. I'm not sure about the other fruit trees you mentioned.
 
Hollybeth Bittick
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Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Hollybeth,
I think skipping a tree or two is probably still close enough for pollination. Stefan Sobkowiak out of Canada does it in his orchard and it is doing well. Also, since the entire space you are planting is less than a quarter acre (if I did my math right), I don't think you will have any problems. If you were going to be planting hundreds of trees across multiple acres you might not want to put a pear tree on each end of a row :)

Have you purchased these yet? I just wanted to mention that certain apple tree varieties pollinate each other better than others. Most places you buy them from will have this information available. I'm not sure about the other fruit trees you mentioned.




I put my order in to our local nursery yesterday, they specialize in plants that are acclimated to our zone and I did some thorough research on which species pollinate each other so we are good there! I'm happy to hear I can intermingle them, it feels more natural to me than grouping everything together.
 
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12 trees in 3,000sqft.
Given how "small" the space you could pant the trees at the two furthest points and they would still polinate each other.

I like to plant with PANX
P=Prunus (peach, plum, apricot, etc)
A=Apple (apple, pear, quince, etc)
N=Legume/Adler/etc
X=Exotics (non-Europeans like native pawpaw or japanese persimmons)
 
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