Varieties of cherries for 7b

Capistan said:
Generally a firm crispy texture means it will be more prone to cracking.
For cooking, pie cherries retain far more flavor than sweet cherries.
Sweet cherry trees on their own roots are huge, like 40 feet high, so anyone without a "cherry picker" lift truck has them grafted them onto dwarf or semi-dwarf root stocks.
Pie and sweet are different species but they are generally graft compatible and may cross pollinate where bloom overlaps, with the caution that the pie branch will be thinner and more twiggy (still vigorous but more in a bushy highly branching habit.), so for multi-grafted trees pie on sweet works better than sweet on pie and you may see a noticeable step down in diameter at the graft after a few years.

Drought is not much of a problem, I mean there is drought and then there is drought. I grow some cherries without any irrigation after the third year, and in a normal year we get no rain of substance from the end of June to labor day (and only a couple inches in early June), very low humidity and 80f-100f most of July Aug. Although the winters fully recharge the soil to field capacity. (and soil depth matters). Commercially sweet cherries are grown with some irrigation in an even dryer hotter climate of east-central WA.
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That's some good information, thanks for adding.
I think I'm just sticking with the sour cherries.
Possibly in the furute I may look to a dwarf sweet cherry, I think there is some kind of bush sweet cherry no?
 
snarfing said:
I like them. Ive heard they struggle in warmer climates. I have juliet, sweet thing, cupid, and cutie pie and some nanking cherries not all of them have produced yet
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Okay cool, I'll have to do some reading and make sure.
We get pretty hot and humid here in N Ga.
I know it stunts my fig trees during those really hot months.

Thank you for the info.
 
BNaula1 said:
Reading this thread recently led to my purchase of two cherry trees. Which I am new to growing 😂
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It was bummer to find that I cannot grow sweet cherries.
I heard that from so many people here.
Actually any fruit I had 2 of for pollination sake refused to bloom at the same time.
I had a Methley plum and a Hollywood plum for pollination, same thing.
Although, We did get about 1/2 dozen Hollywood plums without the Methley.
Just crazy weather patterens messing with the trees I suppose.
 
Capistan said:
Generally a firm crispy texture means it will be more prone to cracking.
For cooking, pie cherries retain far more flavor than sweet cherries.
Sweet cherry trees on their own roots are huge, like 40 feet high, so anyone without a "cherry picker" lift truck has them grafted them onto dwarf or semi-dwarf root stocks.
Pie and sweet are different species but they are generally graft compatible and may cross pollinate where bloom overlaps, with the caution that the pie branch will be thinner and more twiggy (still vigorous but more in a bushy highly branching habit.), so for multi-grafted trees pie on sweet works better than sweet on pie and you may see a noticeable step down in diameter at the graft after a few years.

Drought is not much of a problem, I mean there is drought and then there is drought. I grow some cherries without any irrigation after the third year, and in a normal year we get no rain of substance from the end of June to labor day (and only a couple inches in early June), very low humidity and 80f-100f most of July Aug. Although the winters fully recharge the soil to field capacity. (and soil depth matters). Commercially sweet cherries are grown with some irrigation in an even dryer hotter climate of east-central WA.
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I heard this year is going to be a very bad El Niño. Worse one to come for a long time time. I’m thinking we’re all going to be watering our trees and garden a whole lot summer. 😢
 
snarfing said:
I like them. Ive heard they struggle in warmer climates. I have juliet, sweet thing, cupid, and cutie pie and some nanking cherries not all of them have produced yet
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I have Cupid and Carmine Jewel, and they thrive here in Southern Ontario. I believe zone 7 is the limit for them, but they do much better in colder zones. Both were bred here in Canada specifically for Canadian climates.
 
ktrain said:
That's some good information, thanks for adding.
I think I'm just sticking with the sour cherries.
Possibly in the furute I may look to a dwarf sweet cherry, I think there is some kind of bush sweet cherry no?
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Regular pie cherry trees are naturally much smaller than the self rooted sweet cherry, I wouldn't count them out.
They are bigger than the "bush cherries", but also much more productive, I've found the bush cherries to be more of a landscape novelty.

Dwarf sweet cherries are a product of the grafted root stock choice, there are some strongly dwarfing sweet cherry root stocks, combine with a reasonable pruning plan to make a manageable low structure.

Sweet cherries are actually rather difficult to breed, which is why there are only about a dozen common cultivars and many of those are very old. The problem is they still have heaps of latent wild genes that revert a huge proportion of the seedlings to low quality fruit for the birds. And the market is fairly small compared to fruits with lower labor cost, better storage and shipping (like apples), and consumers rarely notice differences in variety aside from color, so there has been much less investment in sweet cherry breeding.
 
Figgin' A said:
I have Cupid and Carmine Jewel, and they thrive here in Southern Ontario. I believe zone 7 is the limit for them, but they do much better in colder zones. Both were bred here in Canada specifically for Canadian climates.
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I just got a Carmine Jewel to try bush cherries. My 6y old Stella has no cherry this year and only gave me about 6 cherries last year. I don't think Sweet cherry is a good choice for me.
 
mech_pa said:
I just got a Carmine Jewel to try bush cherries. My 6y old Stella has no cherry this year and only gave me about 6 cherries last year. I don't think Sweet cherry is a good choice for me.
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Stella should do well in your climate... Is the production impacted by late frosts or something? Or do you not see a lot of blossoms to begin with?
 
Figgin' A said:
Stella should do well in your climate... Is the production impacted by late frosts or something? Or do you not see a lot of blossoms to begin with?
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This year, no blossom at all! I guess it's due to the late frost we had. It's a bad year for fruit trees! My pear trees had some blossoms that got killed by the late frost too. Only honeyberry blossoms didn't care about frost at all. Last year, I had lots of blossoms on Stella, but only maybe about 20 fruits due to late frost again. Birds got most of them and I got 6 bagged ones. My other sweet cherry tree was killed by rabbit, so it may has issue with pollination. But the late frost seems to have huge impact on it.
 
mech_pa said:
This year, no blossom at all! I guess it's due to the late frost we had. It's a bad year for fruit trees! My pear trees had some blossoms that got killed by the late frost too. Only honeyberry blossoms didn't care about frost at all. Last year, I had lots of blossoms on Stella, but only maybe about 20 fruits due to late frost again. Birds got most of them and I got 6 bagged ones. My other sweet cherry tree was killed by rabbit, so it may has issue with pollination. But the late frost seems to have huge impact on it.
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Yeah, that's what I thought. In your warmer climate with wide temperature swings in spring, that can be a real issue. Even here this year, all my cherry blossoms were damaged due to early warm weather and exceptionally late frosts and cold weather. My cherry trees were covered with thousands of blossoms. I covered them three times when our temps in early May dipped to near or slightly below freezing, but I guess it didn't help. Right now, I see about 8 green berries between the two trees. That's heartbreaking. A part of me wishes I had kept them in containers and moved them to the garage on very cold nights.
 
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