I’ll admit I got a little spoiled this past fall. When you’re weeding beneath a tree practically dripping with ripe fruit and the homeowner tells you to help yourself, what does any sane person do? You know it. You reach up and avail yourself of succulent pears, juicy apples and peaches to die for.

After gorging on fresh fruit for a couple of weeks and gaining a few well-earned pounds in the process, I decided it was time to think about putting in my own orchard and no longer relying on the kindness of near strangers to feed my fruit habit. So I set out to learn about growing my own fruit.

One thing fruit trees require is lots of sun. Another in this neck of the woods is protection from deer. It’s not just that deer may browse on the tender branches of young trees or eat the fruit, the worst damage occurs when they rub up against trees and snap them to smithereens.  This is something I very much want to prevent.

You can make cages around individual trees. Homeowners often do this to protect roses and other perennials and shrubs that are notorious “deer candy.”  But it made more sense  — and cost less money and would use less of my time — to fence the entire orchard in one fell swoop at least six feet high. Luckily for me, the piece of land I’m using is located between my already highly fortified vegetable garden and the neighbor’s fence, so I didn’t need to fence the entire plot from scratch. And because I only want to keep deer out, not keep livestock in, I used plastic deer fencing and two–inch thick posts, not four by fours and wire. This saved me some money as well. (Thrift is a theme, you may have noticed, that runs through most of my home improvement projects).

I got the fence up and now I needed some trees. But I quickly learned you have to put some real planning into fruit tree selection because even if you have plenty of sunshine and rain and great soil, nothing will happen without pollination.

Needing a pollination partner isn’t a problem with apricots, peaches and nectarines because they’re self-fertile. But apples, cherries, plums and pears can be a bit more tricky. You need two different varieties of the same kind of fruit tree for pollination; two trees of the same variety won’t pollinate each other.

European plums are self-fertile, but they can cross pollinate with damsons, cherry plums and Mirabelles. Japanese plums, on the other hand, need another Japanese plum for cross pollination.

Sweet and pie cherries will cross pollinate, but don’t expect an ornamental cherry to work. On the other hand, any kind of apple can pollinate any other kind of apple. The trees don’t care if one is a crab apple and the other is a Braeburn or a Gravenstein or a Pippin. What they do care about is if their bloom time overlaps. It won’t work if one finishes blooming before its pollination partner’s bloom time begins, so take that into consideration  when planting your orchard.

Now that I had my brain wrapped around the basics of cross-pollination, I could start thinking about what kinds of fruit I wanted to grow. I’ll tell you all about that in my next column and you can decide whether my choices get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.