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These plants are marketed as male and female (buy one male and several varieties of female):

Mr. and Mrs. Honeyberry

But, everything I've read says this plant does not have separate sexes.

What's going on?

Ray Butterworth
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1 Answers1

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According to San Diego State University and Better Homes & Gardens, among others, you do indeed need two varieties to set fruit. The Haskap Canada Association explains it like this:

Haskap flowers are self-incompatible and a second compatible (pollinizer) plant is needed for fruit to produce from the flowers. Bees and insects carry the pollen from one flower to another.

They are not dioecious (there are no male and female plants), just non-self-fertile. In this way, honeyberries/haskap are similar to apples and some other fruiting plants.

Jurp
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  • Sweet cherries, with a few, (mostly patented) exceptions are another good example fruit. – Ecnerwal Jul 08 '23 at 17:49
  • Yes, two varieties, but these are labeled as "male" and "female". – Ray Butterworth Jul 08 '23 at 17:53
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    Then they're incorrectly labelled. This is typical in the horticulture trade, where the people who write the labels do not often actually know anything about plants. In fairness to them in this case, "male" and "female" were probably considered easier for consumers to understand than "pollinizer/pollinator" and "fruiter", and even those two terms are incorrect, as each variety would be the pollinizer of the other (see the chart in the Haskap site for examples). – Jurp Jul 08 '23 at 18:42