Again, this is like popping lemons into your mouth and complaining that they don’t taste like oranges. They are not the same fruit and have different applications. Just like lemons and oranges.
If you go at it knowing that this is a lemon and not an orange you can get rid of the disappointment before it happens.
I already said that my expectations probably affected my perception. However, I think comparing one sour cherry (say Romeo or Juliet) to another sour cherry (Montmorency) isn’t the same as comparing lemons to oranges. I understand your point is Bush cherries are a different fruit, but they are cherries, they look like cherries, so comparisons are more natural for people to make than your analogy. But maybe that is the problem- we all tend to think they should be similar but they just aren’t (to my tastes).
I love tart cherries, any kind. Not for fresh eating though. I like that they have high sugar as you need to use less refined sugar when processing. I do eat some dried, they are still tart when dried, but I could eat them all day. They make a very nice syrup too, which I use for cordials or cocktails.
I have other fruit for fresh eating. I love cooking with fruit so need lot’s of tart fruit, to me the best for cooking. The health benefits are tremendous too. I grow Utah Giant sweets for fresh eating. They are so sweet even before fully ripened they are very sweet. They tend to crack but still taste good to me. Last year none cracked, a very good year.
Sorry, didn’t mean to double down on you.
But that’s the point; they are not the same fruit. prunus avium and prunus cerasus are so different that they will not even cross pollinate or graft to one another. Lemons and oranges? They are close enough that they will in fact cross pollinate and cross graft.
Taxonomically speaking under prunus you have plums, peaches, even almonds and a bunch of other stuff. Avium and cerasus just happen to look-alike but genetically they are quite distinct. If there is any doubt just trying one will show which one is the proverbial lemon and which one the proverbial orange.
as far as i remember you can graft P. avium and P. Cerasus to eachother.
I have not yet though. so purly speaking from stuff if read.
Are you sure they are graft incompatible?
I know they can both be grafted to the same rootstocks. But those rootstocks are usualy hybrids.
I think it’s good to adjust expectations. Just like you should not expect buttery melting flesh from asian pears.
But it is natural to compair similair things to eachother. Just like comparing EU and asian pears.
I know lemons and oranges and I know sour cherries and sweet cherries.
The issue here is you don’t know me or Kevin or our experiences.
If you can understand that people’s taste buds are different, then you will understand.
Now i think back, im pretty sure there are even crosses between Prunus Cerasus and Prunus avium.
I think P avium crossed with somthing else (fructicosa?) became P cerasus? or maby the other way around. I remember them somehow being related.
P.avium is 2n=2x=16 and P cerasus is tetraploid though (2n=4x=32) So im curious if the hybrids are triploids, and if they have pollination problems. Cherry polination is quite complex. so it might be fine. Ill have to look it up some day.
I didn’t have any Montmorency handy at the time, so the comparison was based upon my best recollection. So, I’d say they were within the same order of magnitude. I might think differently if I had them side by side.
@thecityman it’s not often my name gets used in the same sentence as “sophisticated”! I definitely appreciate we all have different tastes, and that different fruits work for different purposes. That’s a pretty good endorsement for their processing qualities if you planted that many more.
This is my understanding as well. P cerasus was likely a natural hybrid that stabilized. To me, all the Prunus species referred to as “cherries” have a certain cherry-ness about them that distinguishes them from the plums. To me, the biggest difference flavor-wise between the species is how sour they are. A lot of the smallest ones like chokecherries, pin cherries, and Japanese flowering cherries have some astringency to my palate but otherwise taste like cherries (more on the sour side). I’ve even had feral cerasus cherries in NJ that were not very sour and tasted like very small (~1 -1.5 cm) Bing cherries, if a bit more sour. That being said, I think there’s a lot of variation of other flavors. I’d say the sweet cherries exhibit this variation the most, probably because the lower acid lets them come through more clearly. And there’s been more selection for a variety of fresh eating qualities.
for someone that cant grow sweet cherries in their growing zone, sour cherries are a Godsend! i love both sweet and sours fresh because up here most fruit other than blues, straws and raspberry, dont get real sweet. id much prefer to eat sweets but are happy to have the sours.
I wonder how much of the difference of opinion on the suitability of the Saskatchewan bush cherries for fresh eating has to do with when people have harvested them. I think they can continue ripening on the bush literally for weeks after some people might assume they were fully colored and ready to harvest, but at least some of them will continue turning from a fairly bright red to nearly black. My impression is that a fully ripe Carmine Jewel – the only variety I’ve tasted so far – is about as sweet as any tree-type sour cherry I’ve ever eaten.
The sweetest sour cherries I grew was Danube. Almost no hint of sour. It was so unproductive that I removed it.
I left Juliet in the tree for a long time. They got very dark and shriveled by the time I picked them. They could not be any riper.
Some of us just have taste buds that sensitive to sourness/tartness, I guess.
Like other tastes, same fruit given to two people, one may say it is very sweet while the other may say it is not sweet enough. Nothing wrong with being honest about how certain fruit tastes to you.
But if the difference in this case were just the difference in tastes between people and some people enjoying less sweet/more sour fruit more than others, I wouldn’t expect some people to say that the Saskatchewan cherries were more sour than tree-type sour cherries and other people to say the opposite. If some people said that both were too sour for their tastes and other people said type A was enjoyable but type B was too sour, then it would make sense to attribute the difference to differences in taste, but in this case a few of us have thought that the Saskatchewan cherries we’ve tried have been at least as sweet as tree-type sour cherries or sweeter. So that makes me suspect the cherries of the same varieties that different people have tried aren’t the same sweetness. I’ve eaten various types of tree-type sour cherries that aren’t sweet enough for me to enjoy eating straight, but the Carmine Jewel cherries I’ve eaten are about as sweet and enjoyable as the best sour cherries I’ve eaten (but definitely very different from a sweet cherry.)
I think I will end up with a small harvest of Montmorency this summer so hopefully I’ll get to test them next to CJ and Juliet to draw my own conclusions.
I find Nanking bush cherries to be very good for fresh eating. Of course they are like 90% pit and 10% cherry, but the flavor for fresh eating is way better than the romance cherries.
I have a Juliet, and if I let them hang on the bush until they turn almost black I can eat about 3 before it’s too sour for me.
I’m pretty sure that this is a relative question. It will just depend on what you call sweet (enough). I grow Carmine Jewel and my family has no problem eating them off the bushes when they are ripe. They are nothing like a sweet cherry, imo, but then we are not expecting them to be, we are just happy to eat a tasty (enough) fruit that we grew ourselves. That said, I use most of our harvest to make jam. 
I’m jumping in because I have a taste question about the shrub cherries.
Do they have the same flavour reaction to cooking as a Montmorency?
What I mean is, a fresh M sour cherry is fairly pale, and the flavour is dull and a bit watery without much sweetness.
Cook them and the colour shifts to the brighter red and they are full of the classic “cherry pie” flavour.
The cooked flavour is what I want in a sour cherry. It’s why I grow them. I’d love to try the shrubs, but there is no point, for me, unless they have the same chemical reaction to heat.
So, can anyone who has grown both confirm they work the same?
I prefer the flavor but after processing they get pretty very dark. I mean Montmorency and Evans will put this gorgeous almost neon cherry color while the bush cherries end up almost black in pies and preserves.
I preserve a bunch at runny canning consistency with plenty of sugar, a cup is enough to mix 4 cups of drinking juice, which ends up a nice dark ruby red.
What Don is saying is not about taste or tastebuds. He is saying the tree sour cherry v/s the bush sour cherry are genetically different. Sour is relative as is sweet. That we both know!
Romeo tastes good for fresh eating for my family, even my wife who is more picky. I like kumquat and passion fruits which can be quite sour. Sometimes I’ll eat calmondin straight from the tree.