The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 15 of 21
Fruit trees and the years before blossom
All chapters
- A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
- Reading a bloom window
- Where the year sags
- The gap is worth more than the peak
- Nectar plants and pollen plants
- Willow, the first pollen
- Phacelia, six weeks from seed
- Borage
- Sowing for a date
- A strip sown too late
- White clover in the grass
- A meadow takes two years
- Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
- Heather, the gap's own honey
- Fruit trees and the years before blossom
- A lime tree for the next keeper
- Black locust
- Ivy on the fence
- Nothing to water, nothing dies
- What a planting can name on the jar
- Siting the hive matters more
A fruit tree comes as a whip, a single stem on a rootstock, and the rootstock decides how long it waits:
- On the dwarfing M9 an apple fruits after two or three years.
- On MM106, the rootstock most nurseries sell, after three or four.
- On the vigorous M25, after five or six.
Cherries on Gisela 5 or Colt take three or four.
An orchard is a spring planting. Its blossom comes in the busy weeks of fruit bloom and build-up, when the bees want pollen and brood room more than a gap filled.
In this game a fruit tree grows from whip to sapling, young and grown over four years, blossoms lightly four years after planting and fully from then on, the cherry a fortnight before the apple.