That means part of your annual gardening routine will have to be hand-pollinating your date trees.Д®arly each year, the male trees will produce sheaths of pollen. With only a few trees, you are taking a risk that nothing will pollinate and therefore will produce no fruit. Regular rainfall is usually sufficient, unless itвЂ™s been dry for a prolonged period of time or your tree is still getting established.Дate palms are not pollinated by insects or birds, but by the wind.

ItвЂ™s easy to over-water a date palm, which will kill it. If that is excessive, try a 10-foot dwarf variety.ДЄs mentioned, you need 2 trees but because you will be pollinating by hand (see more on that in the next section), you donвЂ™t necessarily have to plant the trees next to each other if your space doesnвЂ™t allow it.Дates are very slow growing trees, so donвЂ™t be discouraged if your trees arenвЂ™t doing very much each season. Each tree will grow to more than 50 feet tall, and up to 30 feet across. Purchased seedlings are usually cuttings from an existing palm, so they should be properly labeled by their gender.Д¬hoose a sunny location and plant as you would any other kind of tree, digging a hole large enough to hold the roots. So when you plan out your locations for date palms, make sure you have room for at least 2 trees.Д«ecause you need a male and female tree, people generally donвЂ™t start their trees from seed because you would never know what the gender will be for many years. If you want to grow several trees, you can get by with one male and any number of female trees. If you are in doubt, look at the bark of the tree to make a positive identification.Date palms are either male or female, and you will need one of each in order to have any fruit. In most cases, the leaves will be enough to help you determine what kind of maple you have. If the leaf margin, or edge, of your maple's leaves appear serrated, it is probably a red maple.

Roughly toothed: The red maple has a slightly smaller leaf than most other species, with its most distinctive feature being a rough, saw-like edge.Fuzzy: If your maple tree has a soft white coating on the underside of the leaf, it is almost certainly a silver maple.A leaf from a Norway maple will yield a milky sap from the end of the leaf, while the sugar maple will not. The easiest way to tell these species apart using the leaves is to break a leaf off the twig. Large, 5-lobed leaf: Both the sugar maple and the Norway maple have this characteristic, with the sugar maple leaf having a few large teeth and rounded spaces between the lobes.

There is some variation between cultivars of this tree, but most possess this feature to a greater or lesser degree. However, you will note all lobes of this leaf still originate from a single point on the leaf stock and have no stems of their own.

Very deeply-lobed leaves: The Japanese maple is known for very distinct lobing of the leaves, so much so that they almost appear to be compound leaves.

You will be able to easily distinguish between these two species by looking at the bark, detailed below.

Compound leaves: While the majority of maple species have simple leaves, two notable exceptions, the box elder and the paperbark maple, have compound leaves, with three to five leaflets per leaf stock.

Looking more closely at the details of the leaf will give you a better idea what sort of maple you have: Most maple species have simple, as opposed to compound, leaves with multiple lobes, the veins of which originate from a single, roughly central point on the leaf. You may already be familiar with the distinctive leaf shape associated with most members of the genus Acer.

How to tell what kind of tree it is