My Crimson Passion were planted in April 2011, so they are entering year #6. The bigger of the two is over 8’ tall, with the one next to it only a bit over 6’ (fence is ~4.5’ tall).
Even with this size, none of these has produced a single sucker in 6 years.
I planted them with 5’ spacing, so I’ll need to do some size control soon. Maybe a bit after the crop and more in the spring. It’s not like they have much space on either side of the row, as behind them is a fence with grape vines and on the other side is a narrow row with a grape trellis.
The Carmine Jewel which was planted at the same time is still much smaller. It is having it’s first real harvest this year, after just a handful last year.
Your cherry bushes look excellent Bob! I would like very much to try the entire romance series cherries. CJ remained small in one location I added it to for 5 years but set a lot of cherries eventually. Once it came into bearing age it also grew to 6 feet. Heavy soil can be a factor on height so I bet in certain locations 5 feet will be as large as they get. Eventually I promise it will sucker. One location I have a cj Bush from the year they were released and it just suckered last year. I got the Bush from gurneys the year they imported it. They were $35 back then for a 3" plug.
I don’t use much fertilizer on my fruit trees. Most of my trees grow fast enough. My Canine Jewell has been growing at a moderate rate of about 12 inches a year. This year I decided to use some fertilizer. Twice this Spring I applied some fish fertilizer on to my 4 ft Carmine Jewell and 12 inch Crimson Passion. They have already (June 4th) grown 14 inches. The growth is so fast the branches are falling over to horizontal. They seem to be very responsive to fertilizer.
Mine have grown a foot allready too. I just planted them a few weeks ago. CP might have 14" and 10" to 12" on three CJ. Romeo has about 4", and Juliet grew about 7" and got sick. It looks like the top is going to die, but a new shoot came up that looks good. I gave them some MG.
Miracle Grow. I have a chipmunk who made a hole two foot away. He may have dug underneath it, or it could be the hot weather and me giving lots of water with some MG. The one branch of new growth it had or has the leaves turned light green like they are drying up and it wilted. the leaves are curling too. I put a crate with white plastic over it and it stood back up but it wilted again. It’s strange that one out of six is only acting this way so it might be the chipmunk. I’m not sure why it would send up a new growth with disturbed roots though. I think I will just leave it alone and see what happens. It might just be me. Juliette doesn’t like me!
I’m ready to harvest my Carmine Jewel. My wife says they are too small to make a pie, too much work, so I’m going to use them for jam, mix with red currants, or something else. Brix is 16. Nice! Next year I’ll make the pie myself. I don’t feel like doing it this year.
Jam works for me Drew. My plants have grown as much as 16" and as little as six inches or so. My Juliet died, but shot a new healthy growth up that is about six inches tall. Crimsons passion is the most vigorous so far.
Does anyone know when Carmine Jewel fully ripens to dark red in northeast zone 5. It looks like end of June or early July, assuming midwest zone 5 is a few weeks ahead of northeast zone 5.
My Carmine Jewel had ONE cherry this year. It looked ripe (I’m zone 7B NY) so I picked it today. It was sweeter than I expected for a sour cherry so I enjoyed eating it fresh. Looking at the pictures here I expect one tree to be enough for me but I’ll try taking some cuttings for rooting anyway. There are no suckers coming up yet. I also have a small Crimson Passion but I don’t expect the first cherry on that one for two more years.
Look like the Carmines are starting to turn color here in Alberta (zone 3). This seems very early to me as my garden notes from 2014 say CJ ripened (dark red-black) on August 2, and for 2015 I note that they were ripe in “late July”. I realize these are just starting to turn color, but my guess is this year they will be ripe around mid-July. CJ seems to ripen for me a bit ahead of the other Romance series cherries.
Looking good Don. Had a guy that owns a pick your own place in central Iowa stop by this weekend to visit about CJ’s and to look things over here. He’d planted a hundred CJ’s last year or the year before. Was telling him I had all the right conditions according to the info from Dr. Bors to attain a relatively high brix, with the hot & dry weather but mine just never got there. Mainly had 11-12 readings. His comment was “Maybe what they call hot is different from what we do”. It was blistering here. Maybe the overly high heat took it’s toll. (BTW, I just ran out and picked 3 samples from a CJ that are clearly on the decline and maybe more than ripe by now, and got 11.5 on two and 11 on the other one)
I don’t think high brix numbers really matter in cooking with tart cherries though, and I think that’s where this cherry shines. There seems to be a lot of questions as to how it tastes out of hand, but to critique a tart (or as some refer to them as “pie”) cherry that’s mainly for cooking on its out of hand taste probably does it a disservice in some regards.
You make a good point about if not being fair to judge a pie cherry for its out-of-hand eating quality. That’s kind of like judging a sweet cherry based on the quality of pie or jam that it makes. That said, CJ is perhaps the tartest of the UofS cherries, Juliet is much less tart, for example.
I just looked up the weather info for Saskatoon where these cherries were developed. Average high this time of year is 75F, average low is 55. But the record high for June 28 is 100F, so they can get some quite hot weather.
How do you measure brix? With a hand-held refractometer?
