Mixed Orchard Planner
For orchards up to about six acres. Tell it your land and what the fruit is for, and it suggests a complete variety mix — laid out so every tree has a pollination partner close enough to work.
This planner is for hobby growers, small-scale fruit farmers, and backyard orchardists planting mixed fruit orchards of up to about six acres (2.5 ha). Pick your crops, set your spacing, and get a pollination-checked layout you can hand to a nursery.
- Variety suggestions with live pollination checks
- Row-by-row planting layout
- Nursery order list & establishment costs
Planning a mixed orchard is a different problem from planning a block
A commercial grower planting seven acres of Gala is solving a packing problem: one variety, one spacing, dedicated pollinizer rows at a fixed ratio, and a harvest concentrated into a single picking window so the labour arrives once.
A small-scale grower is solving almost the opposite problem. You want fruit spread across the season, not all in a single picking week. You want a scab year or a late frost to take some of the planting and not all of it. You want eaters, cookers, keepers and something to press. And you are not going to give up a row to a crab apple that produces nothing you want — in a mixed planting the neighbours are the pollinizers.
That last point is why this planner arranges the trees rather than just counting them. Once the neighbours are doing the pollinating, where a variety goes decides whether it fruits.
Why a compatible variety can still fail to pollinate
Most pollination advice stops at compatibility: check the flowering group, check the variety is not a triploid or a close relative, and you are done. That is necessary and it is not sufficient, for two reasons that only show up once you draw the orchard.
Distance limit
A partner at the far end of the field is not a partner. This planner treats roughly 25 m as the working limit and checks every tree individually against it. A 20-tree run is 40 metres long; its far end can be out of range even if the near end is served.
Asymmetric compatibility
Compatibility is a property of the pair, and it is not symmetric. Sweetheart pollen suits Van, but Van pollen on Sweetheart is only half functional because they share an S-allele. A simple two-way check gets this wrong for one tree in each pairing.
The failure mode matters here more than the arithmetic. A pollination mistake does not announce itself. The trees grow perfectly well, look healthy, flower on time — and set almost nothing, and you find out in year four when you were expecting your first real crop.
How to use this planner
- 1
Give your land area & orchard purpose
Enter your land size in acres or hectares and select whether fruit is for eating, cooking/storing, juice/preserving, or commercial sale.
- 2
Pick crops & rough proportions
Choose from apple, pear, plum, cherry, peach, and apricot, and set relative target ratios.
- 3
Set equipment clearance & access method
Specify how you move between rows (on foot, with a wheelbarrow or ride-on mower, or with a quad/compact tractor). Rows adjust for mature canopy clearance.
- 4
Choose target tree size
Select mature tree size (dwarfing, semi-dwarfing, or standard) based on how you plan to manage and harvest the trees.
- 5
Review variety mix & live pollination checks
Every suggested variety includes its pomology rationale. Modify tree counts or remove varieties with instant re-checks.
- 6
Get nursery order list & planting order
Generates tree quantities, multi-year phased planting schedules, and baseline establishment costs.
What this planner will not tell you
Every plan carries its own list of gaps, because a tool that is quiet about what it does not know is worse than one that answers less.
- It does not spread your harvest across the season yet. No variety in the reference catalogue carries a harvest date or a storage window. Flowering order and ripening order are decoupled — a cherry can flower mid-season and ripen very late.
- It does not know a cooker from an eater. What you say the orchard is for changes how much of each crop you get, and not which varieties, because end use is not recorded against the varieties.
- It does not check your climate. Winter chill is recorded for a minority of varieties and cold hardiness for none. Check hardiness and chill requirements locally before ordering.
- It does not balance biennial bearing. Some varieties crop heavily in alternate years. Which ones is not recorded, so a plan can land with most of its trees on the same cycle.
The varieties behind the plan
Suggestions are drawn from 262 temperate varieties across 6 crops — 112 apples alone — with ploidy, flowering group, parentage exclusions and, for cherries, S-genotypes transcribed from published pomology references. Where a variety’s data does not support a confident answer, it is left out of the suggestions rather than guessed into them: a wrong partner costs a crop and takes years to discover.
Managed-licence club varieties are filtered out entirely, because a plan you cannot buy the trees for is not a plan. You can still check one you already own with the pollination checker.
The planner suggests varieties, not rootstocks. Ask your nursery which rootstock matches your soil type, site exposure and target tree size — this choice affects vigour, eventual height and how soon the trees begin to crop.
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Take your mixed orchard plan from layout to harvest
The planner above builds your layout and variety mix for free. Inside Kropigo, you can turn your design into a live location with active plot records, tree variety tags, and task management across seasons.
- Variety-level record keeping — Track yields, ripening windows, and pest observations for each individual variety in your mixed planting.
- Phased planting management — Manage your nursery orders and track tree establishment year by year across multi-winter planting phases.
- Spray diary & seasonal task tracking — Schedule and record pruning, spraying, and mowing tasks by season, tied directly to your orchard layout.
- Mobile access for field work — Access your tree layout and notes directly on your phone or tablet while working in the field.
- Harvest & yield tracking — Record what each variety actually produced, season by season, so you know which trees earn their place.
Frequently asked questions
How many fruit trees fit in an acre?
It depends almost entirely on how big you let the trees get, not on the crop. On small (dwarfing) rootstocks at about 3 m between trees and 4 m between rows, an acre holds roughly 330 trees. On traditional standards at 7 m each way it is closer to 80. Both are correct orchards; they are different jobs. Pick the tree size by how you want to pick the fruit — from the ground, off a step-ladder, or up a ladder — and the spacing follows.
How many varieties should I plant in a small orchard?
More than you think, and for three separate reasons: fruit spread over months rather than one picking week, risk spread so a single bad bloom or scab year does not take everything, and pollination — in a mixed planting the neighbouring varieties are the pollinizers. This planner suggests up to 6 varieties per crop and will not give a variety its own place in the plan for fewer than 3 trees, below which it contributes too little fruit to pick separately and too little pollen to count on.
How close does a pollination partner need to be?
Close enough that bees actually carry pollen between the two, which in practice means within about 25 m — two or three rows apart, or a handful of trees along the same row. Honeybees forage over kilometres, so the limit is not whether a bee can cross your field; it is whether it does so still carrying viable pollen, and foragers work along a row rather than across it. A compatible variety at the far end of the orchard is not a partner.
Why does the plan put varieties next to each other rather than in blocks?
Because a solid block of one variety strands its own middle. If a run of twenty trees is forty metres long and its only pollen source sits at one end, the trees at the far end are out of range even though the plan contains a perfectly compatible variety. This planner checks tree by tree rather than variety by variety, and interleaves the runs so no tree is left stranded.
Do I need a crab apple to pollinate my apples?
Usually not, in a mixed planting. Crab apples like Dolgo are planted as dedicated pollinizers in commercial blocks of a single variety, at roughly one crab per eight to ten trees. If you are already planting five or six apple varieties across overlapping flowering periods, they pollinate each other and the crab is a tree that is not giving you fruit you want to eat.
What is a triploid variety and why does it need two partners?
A triploid produces sterile pollen. It cannot fertilise anything — including the tree planted to pollinate it — so that partner has no pollen source of its own and crops poorly in turn. Two compatible partners solve it: they pollinate the triploid and each other. Bramley’s Seedling, Jonagold, Belle de Boskoop and Ribston Pippin are all triploid, and 10 varieties in this planner’s reference data are.
Why are some well-known varieties never suggested?
Because you cannot buy the trees. Cosmic Crisp, Jazz, EverCrisp, SweeTango and Pink Lady are managed-licence “club” varieties: propagation is controlled and nurseries do not sell them to growers outside the licensed group. 5 varieties are filtered out on this basis. Suggesting one would be a plan you cannot carry out.
Does this plan spread the harvest across the season?
Not yet, and the tool says so on every plan rather than implying otherwise. No variety in the reference catalogue carries harvest or storage dates, so varieties here are chosen for pollination reliability and flowering spread. Flowering order is not ripening order — they are decoupled, and a plan that pretended otherwise would give you a confident picking calendar that is simply wrong.
What spacing should I use for a small mixed orchard?
It depends on the rootstock and how you want to manage the trees. On dwarfing rootstocks you can plant as close as 2–3 m in the row with 3.5–4 m between rows, giving a dense planting of 300+ trees per acre. Semi-dwarfing stock opens that to about 4 m × 5 m, roughly 200 trees per acre. Standards need 6–8 m each way, bringing you down to 70–90 trees. This planner calculates it from your chosen tree size and equipment clearance, so you do not have to work it out yourself.
Can I plant fruit trees on a slope or uneven ground?
Yes, and a gentle slope is often better than flat ground because cold air drains away on frosty spring nights instead of pooling around the blossoms. Face the slope toward the morning sun if you can. This planner lays out rows on flat ground; on a slope you would normally run rows across the slope (on the contour) rather than up and down it, both for access and to slow rainwater. The variety mix and pollination checks still apply — adjust the row direction on-site.
Planning at a different scale?
This tool is for mixed plantings up to about six acres (2.5 ha). If you are laying out a single-variety block with machinery clearances, tree density per hectare and an establishment budget with a break-even year, the Commercial Orchard Layout Planner is the right one.