Self Pollinating?
A Common Bogus Claim by Nurseries
It's December, 1999, and I'm thumbing thru the new nursery catalogs. Time after time I am confronted with a misleading statement, that is perhaps not intentional, but is effectively fraudulent. That is the claim made for many fruits that they are self pollinating.
It is exceedingly rare to find a fruit that can pollinate without a pollinator. There are a few seedless fruits that don't need a pollinator, because they don't even require pollination. But that's not what we are talking about, here. We are discussing fruits that are self fertile, which is an entirely different matter than self pollinating.
The claim to self pollination leaves gardeners, especially new ones, to the assumption that pollination will occur all by itself. My years of experience with pollination, even with self fertile crops, have shown many cases of pollination failure, because a sufficient number of pollinators was not present. I used to think that there would always be enough bees to pollinate home fruits and vegetables, but I no longer can have the luxury of that assumption.
Even the few crops that actually can self pollinate (soybeans or tomatoes, for example) will usually respond with better quantity and quality when cross pollinated by bees. Some varieties of strawberries do a limited amount of self pollination, but berry weights show dramatic increases when bees do the job.
C'mon nursery folks, how about some truth in advertizing? Don't make false claims of self pollination for fruits that are really only self fertile (or self pollenizing) .