Carmine Jewell Cherry Yields increasing with age

[clarkinks]

Don,
Excellent looking cherry bush. These carmine Jewell’s sure are the best cherry bush I’ve grown. We grew a lot of western sand cherries and nankings 20 years ago and I still have a few of those around. The difference between CJ and those bush cherries I formerly grew are worlds apart. Carmine Jewell for you obviously is working out nicely and those yields will still go up. I have to ask do you have any suckers yet? I suspect if we fast forward 20 years there will be huge thickets of carmine Jewell’s growing that will look like bounty plum, American plum, or goose plum thickets.

[JohnS]

My Montmorencies are reliable, although I think I may try to use a kids’ artist paint brush to get more fruit. They vary in age from 15 years to one year. My North star is 12 years old. It reliably gets diseases and usually gets fruit too, which is delicious. I have new Balaton and Surefire, which I haven’t decided on yet. I just chopped down 3 Jubileum and Danube because they hardly fruit at all here (like 2 cherries for a fully grown 10 year old tree.) John S
PDX OR

[clarkinks]

I agree John montmorency is our favorite tree cherry. Carmine Jewell is our favorite bush cherry. The north star is on borrowed time.

[JohnS]

Good info Clark. I have seen bush cherries do really well in cold, dry parts of Oregon, but all the bush cherries I’ve seen so far produce no fruit in our wet mild disease filled spring climate. A horticulturalist who works for Raintree (therese Knutson) told me that they arent’ advised for western OR and WA, but Eastern is Ok. I am fired up to hear from Brady and Vincent as to whether Carmine Jewell does well here in our climate. It sounds like it could be great.
Thanks,
John S
PDX OR

[clarkinks]

Think I will top work my north star to montmorency.

[mamuang]

John,
Thanks for confirming my belief that Danube Is non productive. This is its 5th year. Bloom galore, hardly set any fruit. I will convert as many branches to something else.

[Don3a]

Well I got my brix tester and my results are in line with IowaJer. Unfortunately I did the main picking of CJ before I had my tester but I left some on the bush because they weren’t ripe yet. They are riper now, though not yet fully ripe, but they have a brix of 11. I will test some others in a week or so when they are fully ripe. For comparison, my Romeo cherries are reading a brix of 13.5 and I’ve now picked about half of them. My Juliet, which I find the easiest to eat out-of-hand, aren’t quite fully ripe and have a brix just over 14, and my Cupid aren’t yet ripe enough to test. I also tested some of the juice I had sweetened before canning and it has a brix of 21 after sweetening. I think the U of S folks reported some brix readings of 20-22 for fresh cherries in some of the Romance series, which would imply the juice wouldn’t need to be sweetened at all. I don’t forsee any of mine getting that sweet, but I’ll test the Juliet and Cupid when they fully ripen, as those two are the easiest to eat straight.

[speedster1]

Has anyone ever tried grafting Carmine Jewell to G5 rootstock or an existing sweet or sour cherry? Just curious how well it would grow and if it would lose its dwarfing characteristics.

[Johnnysapples]

Someone posted that they did. I’m not sure what cherry they used. I think it was a sweet cherry. They said that their bushes were about two foot taller than the ones on their own roots. This was posted on one of these bush cherry threads this spring.

[clarkinks]

The way carmine jewell sends out suckers I suspect there will be no shortage on them around here in a couple of years.

[clarkinks]

I’m going to hit my CJ’s with copper once the last leaves are gone. Canker is a huge concern in my area and I know many of you have the same worries.

[Drew51]

I incorporated into my spray schedule from day one. Mostly because of the canker issue with sweet cherries.I’m out there spraying anyway. I transplanted both my plants this fall. Both were in containers. I moved one to a bigger container, the other into the ground. Both fruited in containers this year. What a great plant. Kudos to our Canadian breeders. Thank You! I hope you guys up there get us the rest of the series!

[Sue-MiUPz3]

Don, how did your Cupid and Juliet do when ripe? Do you have a favorite between those two?

[Don3a]

Like previous years, Cupid and Juliet were easier to eat out of hand than the Romeo or Carmine Jewel. The CJ had the lowest Brix (around 11), but the other 3 all had a Brix around the mid-teens, even though Romeo was distinctly more tart than Cupid or Juliet. So perceived tartness must be the balance between acidity and sugars, and not just Brix alone. I think my favorite is Juliet, but maybe that’s because it ripened a few days ahead of Cupid so by the time Cupid was ripe I had already eaten enough fresh cherries to last me awhile.

All 4 bushes (plus another tree sour-cherry I have) produced about 20-25 pounds or more of cherries each, my first big year of production. All of the CJ and half or so of the Romeo were made into juice and hot-water canned (lots of natural acid in there to preserve things!). Apart from a few pounds eaten fresh and maybe 5 pounds left on the bushes to sample later on as summer turned to Fall, the rest were all pitted, halved and oven dried into dried cherries. I actually find these dry cherries too tart for my liking, and even the dried Cupid and Juliet taste just as tart to me as the dried Romeo and tree-cherry. But my wife loves them and uses them daily in salads, which is good because there are a lot of bags of them to go through before next summer!

As a side note, the cherries left on the bushes remained in pretty good shape well into Fall. My main harvest ran from mid-July to early August. By early September the cherries on the bushes were still in pretty good shape and tasted less tart than a month earlier. By late September into early October many were still in okay shape but they now tasted very bland, like little bags of water with a slight hint of fruit. So while tartness decreases if the cherries are left on the bush after they first ripen, the intensity of taste seems to suffer too. In my case I like to pick them as soon as I feel they are truly ripe, in large part because I had to completely net the cherries this year, and I was worried each morning that I would look out to see a bird or animal all tangled up in the netting. (Didn’t happen). The tree-cherry I couldn’t get a net over, and the birds pecked holes in an awful lot of those cherries.

[marc5]

Don, thanks so much for your detailed reports on your bush cherries. I only have 3-year-old CJ and they really started producing this year. Can’t wait until next summer! I am ordering Juliet and CP, but much to my dismay I cannot find Cupid.

I wonder if you have had problems with SWD–perhaps you are far enough north to avoid it. I worry about it here in Ohio. Local commercial berry farms are just beginning to battle it, and I have seen small numbers on my small berry plot. I would hate to have them on my cherries.
Marc

[ztom]

I have had problems with them on my blackberries and late raspberries in Northeast Ohio starting around the end of July. Last year 75% of my darrow blackberries were ok but the ones that ripened after around July 26-ish were hit. My Montmorency and Surefire pie cherries ripen well before that and I haven’t had any problem. My Carmine jewels haven’t produced yet, when did yours ripen in Ohio?

[Don3a]

Marc5, so far we seem to NOT have established populations of SWD in Alberta. The government has a bunch of monitoring traps set up around the province, and they have been running for several years or more, but so far it seems that all SWD caught in the traps have likely been from fruit stands that bring in fresh fruit from our much milder neighbor province of British Columbia. These SWD show up relatively late in the season, and cluster around places that have roadside fruit stands selling fruit from out-of-province.

It would be a huge issue if the SWD could establish in my province, since most of what I grow is soft-fruits that would be ideal for SWD infestations… raspberries, blackberries, saskatoons, cherries, plums, goji, northern grapes.

On the plus side, this past week in early December we had an early cold snap so the temperature has not been above 0 degrees F (-18 C) for a full week now. And there is almost no snow, maybe an inch accumulation at best. That combination should kick the crap out of any invading pest that is not used to cold winters, for another winter at least…

[marc5]

Tom, we started picking CJ here in SW Ohio in mid June. Perhaps early cherries are early enough that SWD has not yet awakened!

[JohnS]

I have heard here in PNW that if your soft fruit ripens before Aug 1, you probably won’t get much damage from SWD.
John S
PDX OR

[clarkinks]

I know these Canadian cherries are called prairie cherries for a good reason! The soil on the Canadian prairies is much like our soil here in Kansas. Carmine Jewell can handle the strong winds of Kansas. The weather in Canada is colder than our weather on the prairies! The Kansas scorching hot summers and bitter cold winters prove these cherries are all they are said to be! This is Kansas today 12 degrees and dropping rapidly to -3 F . Snow expected 3-5". Windshield -6 F (wind reported steady at 19-20 mph) currently. Cloud cover 100%. Yesterday we had ice rain. This is not unusual weather for Dec 17th. This blast of cold air is destroying many of our problematic insects and diseases. It’s not doing our rodent population much good either and should all but wipe them out since our predators can now see their tracks. All types of weather extremes seems to be something prairie cherries tolerate. Droughts and heavy rains are normal in this location and something that they seem to be taking in stride. CJ are truly quality cherry bushes!