August Home-Garden

National Gardening Association Sweet Homegrown Cherries

By Jack Ruttle

Gardeners who dream of planting fruit trees usually have sweet cherries right at the top of their list. The plump, glossy fruits are sweet and luscious. They ripen early in summer, when we are good and ready for a change from store-bought apples, oranges and bananas. And cherries are so tender that really great ones are hard to get in the store.

For most of us, however, those bowls of sweet homegrown cherries have had to remain a dream because raising them has presented problems. The trees grow huge -- 40 feet tall or more. Big trees are hard to pick, difficult to spray safely and impossible to net from birds. What's worse, to get cross- pollination you needed to plant two of these giants, unless you restricted yourself to Stella, the only readily available self- fertile cherry variety.

But suddenly, cherries have gotten a lot easier. This year there is very good news for anyone who wants to try his or her hand at sweet cherries. Finally, there is a rootstock that will keep the trees really small available to gardeners. "We're talking about trees that will be around 10 feet tall after 15 or 20 years," Bob Anderson, a sweet cherry breeder at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, told me recently. "You'll be able to pick and prune standing on the ground for a good part of the lifetime of the tree."

The new rootstock is Damil from Belgium. It's the first in a new wave of cherry rootstocks developed in Europe in the '60s and '70s that have passed the test in the U.S. and Canada. Damil (technically called GM 61/1), available to gardeners this year, bears its first appreciable crops in its fourth and fifth seasons, a year or two earlier than standard cherry rootstocks do. The Gisela (ghee'-se-la) rootstocks from Germany also produce trees that can be held to 10 feet or less, but they won't be available until the spring of 1995. These rootstocks have commercial cherry growers even more excited because they bear so heavily and so quickly -- in their third and fourth seasons.

Rich as Chocolate

For new, your choice in varieties grafted to Damil will be somewhat limited, and the situation will likely remain that way for a number of years. But you'll probably want to plant trees with more exotic fruit quality than the standards -- Bing in the West and Hedelfingen in the East. That's not to say that those two aren't excellent fruits, but there are richer flavors available.

Among connoisseurs, Lambert, a western variety, is a favorite. For the East, Kristin and Ulster have a similar flavor. Eating cherries like these is somewhat like eating chocolates. The strong cherry flavor, and the tartness and sugar that goes with it, sometimes fatigue your tongue. A dozen of these supersweet cherries can taste like a lot.

What makes a variety suitable for the East versus the West, by the way, is its tendency to crack in rainy weather. This happens when moisture enters through the skin of the fruit, not the roots. Very sensitive varieties can split in the slightest drizzle or mist. Even in the relatively dry cherry districts in British Columbia and the western states, a bit of rain sometimes ruins part of the crop. The firm and crisp-fleshed varieties are most likely to crack; soft-fleshed varieties resist cracking. In the East, you should grow only the most crack-resistant varieties. Westerners can grow pretty nearly anything they want.

Easy on the Bees

Some of the highly flavored cherries have other qualities that may help you narrow your choices. If you have room for only one dwarf tree, you'll have to choose a self-fruitful variety. Lapins (available on Damil) and Sweetheart, recent introductions from British Columbia, are considered very fine, approaching Lambert for flavor. But Lapins and Sweetheart are prone to cracking. In the East and Midwest, plant the self-fertile Stella or Starkrimson, which were introduced about 20 years ago. Their flavor is not of highest quality, but both varieties are widely adapted. And where space is tight, either one of these is a lot better than no cherries at all! High-quality self-pollinating varieties for east of the Rockies are in the works from Geneva, New York,and the Vineland, Ontario, research stations.

Another advantage of the self-fruitful varieties is that they all are good pollinators of any other sweet cherry variety. The sweet cherry family is full of pollen incompatibility and picking two that go well together is a little like ordering from a Chinese menu. So even if you have room for two dwarf cherries, something like Lapins or Sweetheart may still be a good choice.

Not for the Birds

Another way to get dependable pollination is by choosing a yellow cherry. Yellow varieties are also usually bird-proof. The top choice in a yellow cherry is Stark Gold. It's a pure yellow with no red blush, and red is what the birds seem to go after. In the West, gardeners could also grow Ranier, a very large cherry, but it's blushed with red. Either of these has very high-quality flesh and will pollinate virtually any other sweet cherry, except each other. Stark Gold originated in Nebraska and is one of the most cold-hardy and latest-blooming sweet cherries.

If you grow the classic red cherries, you will certainly have to stop the birds. What can you do about them? "Try all the tricks you can find in the folklore and the scientific lore - from preventing the first bird from finding the crop to netting the tree. But how the heck do you do that?" Ed Probsting says, laughing. Probsting, a researcher at Washington State University in Prosser, has spent his entire X-year career looking for better methods of sweet cherry production. "We don't think much of the scare-eye balloons, but use them anyway. Netting works, but there can't be the smallest hole or the birds will find it." Or you can grow mulberries; birds seem to prefer them to cherries.

The Bigger the Better

Most people seem to prefer their sweet cherries large. And there are good reasons for that. Bigger cherries are much easier to pick, for one thing. But they also tend to taste better. That's because cherries, as a rule, tend to set too many fruits. And when a tree oversets, the fruit stays smaller and doesn't develop as sweet or as full a flavor. Ripening is often delayed, too.

It isn't practical to thin cherries by hand the way we do larger fruit like apples or peaches. But there are two ways around the problem. You can plant very large-fruited varieties. "When cherries are very big, it's usually because the variety is somehow self-thinning, for some pollination biology reasons that we don't yet fully understand," says Geneva's Bob Anderson. Summit is one of the best-flavored large varieties. It was introduced by the Summerland Fruit Research Station in British Columbia, and, surprisingly, is somewhat crack resistant, perhaps because the flesh is a little soft. It's very popular with commercial growers in France, according to David Lane, the cherry breeder at Summerland. Another gigantic cherry is Royalton, released by the Geneva, New York, experiment station last year. Royalton also has exceptionally fine flavor, though it's too new to say how widely adapted it will prove to be.

The other way to get bigger cherries is to reduce the crop load by pruning. Cherries fruit on short lived buds at the base of one-year-old wood and on long-lived spurs that develop higher up on that same wood during the second season. Cutting out two- and three-year-old branches reduces that amount of frost. Where spring frosts are a serious threat to the cherry crop, a good tactic is to save some pruning for the days right after bloom -- when you can assess how high the losses from the frost are -- but before the trees leaf out, according to Ed Probsting in Washington.

Ten-Foot Trees

Sweet cherries on short trees will revolutionize home cherry growing. Commercial growers will probably plant these new cherry trees on wire trellises, and gardeners should probably consider doing the same. Tying the tree to a framework helps to restrict the size even more and to push the tree into early fruiting. Trellised cherries are also easier to cover with bird-proof netting.

One of the fundamentals in fruit growing is that the smaller the tree, the easier it is to grow the fruit to perfection with a minimum of spraying and time spent. Paradoxically, smaller trees always translate to bigger crops per square foot of space. So as we shrink our cherry trees, we gain not only higher yields but the opportunity to try even more varieties. And I don't know about you, but I'm starting with the biggest, most richly flavored one I can find -- flavor fatigue sounds pretty good to me!

Cherry Country

Sweet cherries among the most cold-hardy of the tree fruits. Prime sweet cherry country lies from hardiness zone 7 northward through zone 4. The trees are hardy to -30 degrees F, and so are the flower buds when the trees are fully dormant. Sweet cherries bloom just a little later than peaches and often escape serious frost damage. Open flowers are quite frost resistant down to about 28 degrees F. At 25 degrees F, however, 90% of the flowers will be killed. And some frost damage isn't all bad. Cherries tend to overset, so thinning by frost can actually be beneficial. "We figure 40% blossom survival will produce a full crop," says Ed Probsting of Washington State University.

South of zone 7, the problem is mainly one of heat in summer. Many sweet cherries will flower and fruit well wherever they can get about 600 or more hours of winter chill. But in the West, high daytime temperatures can induce deformed fruit. In the East, humidity coupled with heat encourages split fruit and fungal diseases, especially brown rot.

Coast to Coast Cherries

Here's a short list of cherry varieties notable for flavor and other qualities that make them better choices for gardeners than the standards

Bing (for the West) and Hedelfingen (East.) The weastern varieties are all very crack resistant. Some on the list will be hard to get on the new dwarf rootstock,

Damil. You could ask the nursery to custom graft varieties for you. Or buy an extra tree and begin propagating your own dwarf rootstock for future grafting. The varieties are presented in order of ripening, the dates being averages recorded at Geneva, New York or Summerland, British Columbia. One early tree and one late tree would provide a month or more of sweet cherries.

For the East:
Ripens July 6. Medium to large, firm, red fruit. Moderately vigorous and spreading tree. Very cold hardy and blooms later than most, escaping frost damage.

ULSTER and KRISTIN
These varieties are nearly identical. Ripen July 10. Large, dark red fruit of very good flavor. Trees are vigorous, upright and quick to bear.

STARK GOLD
Ripens July 15. Yellow fruit with no red blush. Very good flavor but often small. The tree is spreading with a tendency to overcrop. Very cold hardy and late blooming.

HUDSON
Ripens July 21. Large, firm, dark red fruit. Very hardy and late blooming. The tree is moderately vigorous and spreading. For the West:

EARLY BURLAT
Ripens July 7. Large, sweet, deep red fruit. The tree grows much like Bing -- moderately upright and moderately vigorous.

RANIER
Ripens July 16. Yellow cherry blushed with red; very good flavor. Somewhat crack resistant. Vigorous, upright tree.

LAPINS
Ripens July 18. Very large and highly flavored fruit. The tree is quick to bear and an upright, vigorous grower. More crack resistant than Bing or Lambert. Self-pollinating.

SWEETHEART
Ripens July 26. Very good flavor and dark red fruit. Moderately vigorous and upright tree that is very quick to start bearing. Ripens so late it often avoids damp weather that causes splitting. Self-pollinating.

Provided by NGA
Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.

Back to Home Improvement Preview Lawn And Garden Preview Home Decorating Shopping Center