Mandarin tree

 gday, ive got a small Mandarin tree in a pot (a seedless Silverhill
clone/graft), its only maybe a year old and ive just noticed it has started
to get quite a few small round flower balls which will open up soon, i guess
it knows spring is here. Are mandarin trees self pollenating? and in that
case can I collect their pollen and brush it on the stigmas to manually
pollenate the flowers to get more fruit?

 

Hi Dave,

Mandarins are self pollinating but no matter how many flowers you pollinate
the tree can only support so much. There will be a natural increase in fruit
as the tree gets bigger. So basically you would be wasting your time
pollinating flowers. Best to let mother nature do the job. Such a young tree
would only have a handfull of fruit I reckon but I could be wrong.

I so love the Imperial Mandarin it is best tasting in the mix. Even if it
has seeds.

I have also found that low hanging branches bear more fruit so some weights
on the end of some branches may encourage more fruit.

Good luck with it.

Cheers

Richard

 
If you read that "Orange tree" thread just above this one youll see that
mother nature doesn't always do as good a job as possible :)
Also in my case the mandarin tree is in a pot plant that has a base that's
regularly filled with water so no ants will be able to get into it without
me helping them with some sort of bridge, so it'd just be up to bees and
small birds. I think I'll give manual pollination a go

 

Mother nature did too good a job on mine.  Too many fruit while the tree is
still far too young.

Jen

 

This is the first year for mandarin tree (or is it the second?)  and I got
over 2 dozen this year.  I should have removed a lot of them when they were
tiny though, because the full grown fruit is only very small - but they
taste great.

Jen