I found a couple of dark CJ left on my trees (been neglecting them) and i have to say…they are pretty good. I’ve been eating sweet cherries the past week or so…still no sweet cherry, but a nice change. No rot either…while my Lapins was loaded with rot this year…worst ever. I filled up a 3 gallon bucket of brown rotted cherries and buried them in a hole in the ground.
2 Likes
Just a heads up but i found a few more CJ …ripe…soft…and they were crawling with SWD. Uggggggghhhhhh …
I must have a population of swd overwintering…probably from years of growing raspberries. Last year the elderberries were just full of swd…i’m going to have to spray my blueberries or cover them in mesh.
2 Likes
My Japanese beetles have completely passed over my Romance cherries for my sweet cherry, peaches, plums, and apples. I have Romeo and Juliet in their first leaf. The JB’s haven’t even touched the bush cherries. I am sort of surprised that they are so far down the list of things to eat.
3 Likes
Wow. I’m surprised. My bush cherries got hit just as bad as my sweet cherries.
2 Likes
I built a few SWD traps using apple cider vinegar. I’ve already trapped nearly a dozen flies. Next year i’ll use mass trapping early.
1 Like
Same here JB are hitting honeycrisp but nothing else yet.
1 Like
I read an article about mass trapping SWD. Be interesting to see how it works.
2 Likes
@IowaJer,
Your cherries look great this year. Very impressive yields on everything you grew. We are a little more dry in Kansas than some places but this location gets 30+ inches annual rainfall. There are places in Kansas that get half that much. I feel water and sunshine directly correlates to cherry yields. Kansas is very windy so the soils tend to dry quickly and the sun bakes the clay and loam to a very hard brick like consistency. Those conditions are not overly friendly to fruit so these little cherries really are champ. I feel like having them in rows lowers production as well since they are competing with each other for nutrients. It’s really not a good option to supplement the bushes with water because 5 acres of fruit trees and bushes takes a lot of water. Think I’m kinda stuck with the yields I have. From my perspective even though yields were not as good as what you got I feel they were definitely all we needed as far as cherries go. Long term I will plant more bushes.
2 Likes
Thanks Clark, I feel like I’m sure you do - it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches, having very little to do with me, as you’ve noted it’s the bushes are just troopers.
But to think of 5 bushes making loads of cherries to a point of - I’m probably going to leave literally gallons of them on the bushes.
Right now we’ve taken 27 1/2 gallons (123 3/4 lbs -or- 24.75 lbs per bush)
Had a guy down yesterday that picked a couple gallons and had planned on bringing his Sister, his son and his girlfriend today to make a dent - but he stood me up…
Had a gal and her adult daughter down last evening that picked 4 gallons. We were sitting on the deck afterwords, just drinking coffee and talking. She said while picking her daughter had said “Man, if these were gold we’d be rich” She said I told her riches don’t have to be gold in color. Then she said she’d been to the local pick your own orchard for strawberries and they told her they didn’t hardly have a cherry crop this year, late cold snap. (It got my brother-in-law’s tree as well)
Anyway unless something changes, I’ll probably not take any more CJ’s as I think I’ll now focus on getting in some more ER’s. As of today I have only taken 10 gallons off the tree.
I hate that I’m probably leaving double digit gallons on the bushes but they’re starting to show more damage too, whereas the ER’s came around later and have seemingly less problems quality wise at this point and are very ready to be picked.
But I WILL prune these CJ’s down to more manageable heights, and if my yields suffer next year because of it…, that’ll be a good thing I think!
3 Likes
I’ve got a bunch of mahaleb rootstocks to graft and have been deciding weather to go sweet or sour cherries. Sweet cherries seem like the way to go because they are highly desirable. Sour cherries are relatively easy to raise here and I like the idea of carmine Jewell being on their own roots. Your early richmond looks like an excellent producer. Not sure I would want to sign up for pulling out the ladder and picking sour cherries any more than I do now. Montmorency need to be picked while on a ladder. We need to find a sweet cherry that is like carmine Jewell. It’s been brought up before but CJ might make a great rootstock.
2 Likes
Pruned inside depends on climate, I would think, as THEDerek says. We have a very wet spring climate and not too cold, which fungus love. I will probably do more of that. Great idea.
John S
PDX OR
3 Likes
As I mentioned above, I still have a bunch of cherries on the bushes that I just plan to not mess with.
Here are three pictures from three different bushes taken 20 min ago. Again, on some of the leaves and cherries you can still see the white Sevin residue that I sprayed on 6/18, like ten days ago - and we had a little shower yesterday morning.
So I kind of feel guilty letting fruit go to waste, but I just can’t get to it all.
Interestingly, I’ve found that if I say “I have a couple gallons of cherries bagged up, could you use them”? I get almost 100% takers, but when I let people know they can come pick, the precipitation rate falls quite a bit…
The good news is I heard a rumor that the grand kids are coming over today with the idea of picking some to advertise for sale on Grandma’s FB account so they can earn a little summer spending money…
The bad news is two fold - a) the biggest concentrations are in the upper parts of the bushes. b) I think there are plenty of insect damaged/wormy cherries in there by now.
I’ll have to see if I can find an area in the CJ’s with fairly healthy cherries, otherwise I’ll get them busy on the ER, as I’ve left plenty on the lower branches just for the little wee ones to be able to get without crawling up on a ladder.
5 Likes
Lol, similar story – a neighbor who had an apple tree that they say produced great apples (never sampled the apples myself), but they just weren’t very fond of apples, said that whenever they offered apples to their friends or work colleagues, they got great response as long as they picked the apples and delivered them to the people who wanted them. But if they said, “come and pick as many as you want”, they got zero takers.
3 Likes
Id bet a lot of those ‘lazy’ people who wont pick their own fruit will take it, if you pick it for them, and then let it rot in their fridge…
4 Likes
@IowaJer I think @TheDerek is right many would just waste the fruit. If they won’t pick them they likely won’t make Jam later with them because pitting is no small chore. I juice mine because it’s much more time efficient. I need to look at what we will do with the fruit instead of what we can’t.
3 Likes
Funny thing is, my 37 year old daughter is kinda that way. I can’t seem to impress upon her that it’s kind of an effort to grow, maintain, and harvest the cherries and once off the bush/tree they need dealt with. Still, I walk in their house only to see a gallon of cherries on the counter from two days ago…
We had some early pickers, and when it got to a place where time was of the essence, we’d have people say they’d come and not show, or say “…I might come down Saturday” But that’s just too late - it’s over by then.
I talked to one of the guys that came down earlier to pick with his wife, they had taken 4 gallons and he said his wife was about all pitted out! They didn’t want any more to do with cherries.
On the other hand, the grand kids picked some and the original plan was for the kids to sit down at the local farmers market and sell them, but then my wife decided to put them on Facebook as well as two or three local swap sites - we had people coming up from Omaha, from Harlan (like 45 miles) Elkhorn, etc. I mean she posted them at like 11:30 at night and sold I think 22 of the 24 quarts the grand kids had picked in about an hour or two at that late hour!
Then she kept telling people we could get them more so me and the kids were doing some last min order filling…
At $5 a quart the kids made some pretty good bank for not a ton of effort.
In the end there was a total of 54.5 gallons of cherries harvested between the ER and the CJ’s.
Of that, CJ was 31.5 gallons which is 141.75 lbs or 28.35 pounds per bush. Had I started harvesting earlier (and not done the skid loader work…) the take would have been even more, but once there started being some damaged fruit it became more a thing like… ya know I have a tree full of ER’s that are still behind the CJ’s and therefore the fruit is in better shape so…
But I’m always glad when the cherry season is over, because I feel like I really burn the midnight oil a lot of nights in a row time I get 'em picked, pitted, and froze.
Now it’s on to the garden stuff until peaches and apples come due 
6 Likes
No pain - no gain!
Nice haul, but I too am real glad once it over with.
So what’s the plan? Pies, sauce, jam, etc.
3 Likes
Id like to can some pie filling, never done it before tho. If anyone has a good recipe please post it or a link. Last year I did some jam and some just canned in syrup, which is great on pancakes or with yogurt. What is your favorite use for these? I also might soak some in sugar for a day or two and then strain and dehydrate them, or even dehydrate some plain for cooking purposes.
2 Likes