Best Tasting Cornelian Cherries and Heat-tolerant Bush Cherries? (US, Maryland, z7a)

Ok thanks for narrowing down what your willing to spray that makes it easier to tailor advice to your situation. Now for some general advice. Look at the forum carefully and search for topics that deal with the fruits you are growing. For example good searches would be “peaches brown rot” or “cherries spraying”. This will give you a good idea of what you up against in term of disease and insect pressure. Location of the poster matters too since in arid regions out West disease and insect pressure is much lower.

Scott Smith and Alan have spray schedules that give you an idea of different approaches that might work for you. Scott’s schedule is semi-organic and Alan’s is synthetic. Scott’s is very detailed and maybe a bit overwhelming at first. Here are links

What you can grow is different in every microclimate but in hot humid regions here is the general order of difficulty (roughly) for common fruits from easiest to hardest.

Apples
Pears
Tart cherries
Plums
Peaches

Exotic fruits like cornus mas are harder to characterize for a variety of reasons. So far problems for me are limited but essentially there is nothing you can spray on them if you have a problem. Because sprays have to be tested and evaluated before you can use them especially on food crops. Well, cornus mas is not grown as a food crop in the United States so no one has tested it as such which means you can’t technically even use things like sulfur or Surround on it.

From what you have said for fungicide sprays you are going to be limited to copper, sulfur, Indar, Immunox, Elevate and maybe Bonide Infuse. If you want to check their hazard to bees look at this post. Note you may have to search by the common name rather trade name in some cases in the link in the post.

Since you’re not willing to spray synthetic insecticides you will be limited to bagging and spraying Surround for insect control.

For heavy soil it helps to plant on high ground or make berm or raised bed. Apple are fairly resistant to phythophthora especially trees on Geneva rootstocks since these rootstocks were bred for phythophthora resistance. Cherries are more sensitive again, good rootstocks like Krymsk and Gisela help in this area.

Peaches are going to be difficult due to brown rot. Very few peaches are resistant to it Glohaven being one. You may have a honeymoon period of a few years before it reaches you but you will have to definitely spray at some point for brown rot. Stone fruits are tough to grow in general because of rotting issues. On the forum over the long term organic sprayers tend to add a synthetic fungicide like Indar to deal with the problem since sulfur isn’t highly effective against brown rot. Tart cherries are easier since they don’t get brown rot as bad.

If you like tart cherries fresh cornus mas fruit will not be too tart for sure. You do have to wait until the fruit is soft before you eat it or it is very bitter. I only eat the fruit fresh I never have cooked with it.

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