Pollinating your Apple Trees Increases your crop Size 

Most apple trees need to be pollinated in order to bear fruit, and even self-fertile varieties still benefit.
However, apple and crab apple trees are very common all over the UK, even in the city, so there is a high chance that you have a suitable pollination partner in your area already, in which case you can ignore this article! 

What are Pollination Partners?

Cross pollination happens when two apple trees of different varieties are in flower at the same time, and insects are present to move the pollen from one flower to the other. 

Pollination groups represent flowering periods, and trees will cross pollinate with other trees in their own group and adjacent groups, e.g. a tree in Pollination Group C will cross pollinate with trees in groups B, C, and D (note that the letters can be replaced with numbers, so Group C is the same as Group 3).

Use our easy pollination checking tool to quickly find partners for a given variety, or browse the table below.

Crab Apple Trees are Perfect Pollination Partners 

Crab apple trees are the best pollinators. They have long flowering periods, therefore covering most pollination groups, and make loads of pollen.
There are plenty of good options, but Malus John Downie or the bright yellow Malus Golden Hornet both make useful fruit for cooking, and are the best for an orchard owner.

Are Apple Trees Self-Fertile?

The holy grail of apple breeding is to produce a variety that pollinates itself and produces its best quality and quantity of fruit: so far, no apple is totally self fertile in the sense of achieving all those things.
a "self-fertile" tree still needs to be pollinated by another variety, although they crop reasonably well without cross pollination.

Triploid Apple Trees:
Triploid trees have totally sterile pollen: they cannot pollinate themselves or other trees. They can only be pollinated by other trees.
This means that a triploid tree needs another tree to pollinate it, and that other tree also needs a pollination partner, since the triploid tree cannot return the favour. 

Bees make Pollination happen:
Thousands of insects get involved in pollination, but bees (including all the wild solitary and bumblebees) do more than 90% of the work: no bees means poor pollination. Everything that attracts & support your local bees is good for your apple trees. Avoid neo-nicotinoid based pesticides, and provide habits for solitary and bumblebees - even better, get a honey bee hive.

A self-fertile tree in a closed greenhouse will need hand pollination to move the pollen around the flower (by the same token, apple breeders use fabric bags to keep insects off the flowers of trees growing outdoors, so that the breeder decides which varieties to cross-pollinate by hand).

Apple Tree Pollination Table