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girlbug2

Pomegranate didn't fruit

girlbug2
13 years ago

My Sweet pom is in its second year planted in my back yard; it started at 2 feet tall and has grown to 5 feet tall and wide. It seems healthy and vigorous, and it had a few dozen orange flowers in late spring--but no fruit set at all.

But meanwhile, no trouble setting fruit on my peach trees, tomatoes and squash. Plenty of bees about, although I never noticed them visiting the pomegranate.

Is this normal for a 2 year old pom? Or, did I do something wrong to prevent fruit set?

Comments (8)

  • jollyrd
    13 years ago

    Dont know what to tell you. Mine is barely 2 ft, set few flowers, but then they just dropped and no fruit - which is probably good since I doubt it would benefited from having to carry a whole pomegranate on its 2ft frame and fragile branches.

    I cant see how it grew from 2ft to 5ft in one year - you must have done something good for it.

  • Scott F Smith
    13 years ago

    It probably is smart dropping its flowers. I had a small pomegranate bear a fruit which I did not pull off and it put too much energy into that fruit and did not grow that year and died over the winter. That is why most fruit trees do not bear until their 3rd to 5th year.

    Scott

  • vieja_gw
    13 years ago

    Is it the fruiting 'Wonderful' variety? It has single flowers There are others that have prettier double petaled flowers but don't produce fruit. Mine are over 50 yrs. old & last spring after it had just begun to leaf out we got a late frost & no one's here in the City had any fruit! This year the bushes ('8 ft. 'trees'!)are loaded with flowers & golfball size fruit already. What amazes me is that the bushes will flower all summer with different fruit sets/times but in the Fall ALL the fruit ripens at the same time & the same size?! We bought a 'Wonderful' plant in the Fall x Home Depot for our son & it sat in the garage all winter but he set it out this Spring & is growing well (about 2 ft. tall now) but will be a few years I think before setting fruit. Have patience (I grew mine old ones x seed! x a store-bought fruit!)

  • destin_gardener
    13 years ago

    I've had 3 pomegranates in the ground for 6 years. Two have flowered almost every year, but never produced any fruit. This year, I fed them really well, and the two that have been flowering flowered again as I expected, but I was surprised yesterday, when I saw 2 developing fruits on one of the two. We'll see if they make it to maturity. I plan to feed them well this fall, then again in the spring , so maybe I'll see more fruit next year.

  • girlbug2
    Original Author
    13 years ago

    Well I feel better knowing that my pom isn't the only one to take extra years before setting fruit. The catalog descriptions all say that pomegranates bear fruit in the 2nd or 3rd year. I guess that says something about trusting information from somebody that wants your money!

    P.S. it's a Sweet pom, single flowering.

  • Suzi AKA DesertDance So CA Zone 9b
    13 years ago

    A lot of fruit trees don't fruit for 3-5 years, so I wouldn't worry! I got a dwarf pom from Gurney's and it gave me one pom the first year, two this year so far, and it's loaded with flowers. The standard size poms probably take longer.
    Suzi

  • lucky_p
    13 years ago

    girl,
    I had some poms that I started from cuttings I took from a neighbor's tree when I was 8. They took every bit of 30 years to begin fruiting - but, I'd planted them within 20 ft of a black walnut(at 8, I didn't know any better). Once the BW was removed, they started fruiting like gangbusters!

  • jessmk
    10 years ago

    Hi, well I feel a little better for having read your posts in regard to your pommies. :) I've had a pomegranate for about 4 years, I think. (time gets away from me these days). For a couple of years I've had one or two fruit from it, but not very large. This year I really thought we were going to have a bumper crop - literally 100's of flowers. About 90 per cent of them are now on the ground and not one fruit. The tree is about 6ft high now. I had thought that there weren't any bees around to pollinate it. Do you think this could also be a problem?