They are even tough here, especially in a home orchard site without full sun. No early eastern sun and not only does fruit crack most years but the flowers rot before trees even set fruit. Of course, netting is usually essential also.
Yes, availability of good fruit is more typical in areas with big and wealthy population hubs.
So I’ve noticed that even if a cherry grower grower’s located in an upstate, hilly area they tend to be located in states that have coastal areas (Saunders Bros in VA has 8 acres of cherries, Terhune Orchards in Princeton has high tunnel cherries, a handful I can’t remember off the top of my head in Michigan, Weaver’s, Linvilla and several others in PA)
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that most people in the US live within 80 miles of coast because of reasons…
Cherries are also one of those things a lot of people have some experience with but only a handful of people can nail right…I was at a grower’s convention years ago and I distinctly remember Justin Weaver of Weaver’s Orchard telling the speaker, ‘I get so many white flowers on my cherries it looks like we’re floating on one of those puff clouds in a cartoon and then June comes around I’m so annoyed I want to cut out the block’
Yeah, cherries…hard to find someone who’s not right by accident and actually has expertise with them…I’ve noticed resistance with the Southeast PA growers I know to adopt and adapt to growing advances probably contributes to a lack of cherries…high tunnels (and haygrove in particular) have been using and touting high tunnels for cherry use for decades at this point and still the line from of the orchards I used to work at was, ‘Well we don’t use high tunnels’
It seems the west is able to supply the demand of most of the nation and they don’t need tunnels and can probably undersell growers that require them. At any rate, from what I’ve read, they are far from perfect, because it isn’t just the rain that lands on the cherries that makes them crack, water drawn from the roots can do so as well.
Growers will adapt when they see their neighbors making money by doing something new.
Our situation in our part of the Finger Lakes was similar but worse than Andy had further to our north. I had hoped most of our fruit set would endure even as the blossoms went brown, but within a few weeks it became clear the year was going to be a bust. I went around a few days ago to attempt an inventory. We will have some cherries (from English Morello, Montmorency, Balaton, and Garfield Plantation), one peach from a total of 5 trees that had blossoms, and a few pears on each of Beurre Giffard, Seckel, Tyson, and Clapp’s Favorite. Only about 20 apple trees had any fruit at all – we have more than a hundred apple trees, but not all are of bearing age. Of those, only a few trees had more than one or two apples. No apple tree had more than a handful. This time of year the apples are tiny and green, so I might have missed a few and might be surprised later in the year, but it still won’t add up to much.
Good news was that two of the young trees that blossomed for the first time, Blenheim and Glowing Coal, are producing a first fruit.
So sorry. It sucks when the season is over before it’s begun. We barely got to freezing on the May event, it was the Feb sub-zero morning that thinned the trees. However, only my apricot crop was virtually wiped out. I didn’t have to spend nearly as much time as on a good set year thinning stonefruit and some trees will have nothing… but more than enough do in my own orchard. J. plums are very light but all other categories I grow are looking fine to fulfill my needs.
I could paraphrase Cat Stevens. And if I ever lose my crop, I won’t have to thin no more.
I love fruit on young trees…it makes feel like I did something right.
I think this depends rootstock…have you found cropping apples on young trees makes for shorter tree than you would have otherwise gotten?
It sounds like Saunders Bros in VA picked the right spot for their cherry trees. I think theirs are on the side of a hill. They also don’t use high tunnels and frost isn’t what they have issues with…last year it was wildlife problems.
They have (or used to have, it sounds like the family wanted to remove some of the trees) 8 acres of cherries and struggle to sell them…the person who was charge of fruit sales (it someone new now) came from another industry and a couple years ago when western growers had a lighter crop than normal my friend who works their had his hopes up that Saunders could pick up some of the slack…oh well…it sounds like it was a missed opportunity
I’m confused on this thread. Are we talking sweet cherries or tart cherries. I see tart cherries mentioned, but they are light years easier to grow and produce than sweet cherries here.
We just sold all of our first year (first year production) of Juliet tart cherries. Coming up we have our Balaton cherries which have a good crop but are later.
Peaches were almost a bust this year, apples and tart cherries were decent. I would never again try to grow sweet cherries here. I tried about 7 varieties of sweet cherries once. They were a punishment. They bloom too early and their pollination requirements are too finicky for our weather. And they love to die from canker. But tart cherries are almost a sure thing here. They bloom late, self- pollinate, require no thinning, and don’t biannual bear. The only issue with them is that you have to keep them sprayed for cherry leaf spot.
My experience exactly on sweet and sour cherries. The only sweet cherry that i think might make it here would be black gold or white gold. They did not work out for me but in a town i bet they would be ok. As far as sour cherries go i prefer carmine jewell to Juliet in terms of pounds of yield. Juliet is slightly bigger, slightly sweeter, but a light producer.
I think it is safe to assume the word cherry will be referring to the sweet kind and almost anyone referring to sour cherries will put the word sour in front- at least in the part of the country I live now and in the west where I was raised. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen sour cherries available in a grocery store in either place as fresh fruit and I believe even people who are foodies and grow sour cherries here refer to them as such.
I used to grow sour cherry trees in my nursery but demand was too small- most people want sweet cherries, although the sour ones make some of the best preserves on the planet and have wonderful flavor to use as culinary fruit- if you have some patience and spare time. I like them straight off the tree as well, but, like most people, will eat a lot more “cherries” than sour cherries when I have a choice.
I’m sorry to hear about your peach crop. What did them in?
It is so much easier to grow fruit trees for sale than fruit… if you have a market for them. I’ve had trees die, but in 30 years have never been terribly hurt by crop failure. I have to admit to not making much money on plums because carving out black knot takes so much time and apricots because they so often are killed by erratic cold weather, probably partially the result of the high moisture in the ground reducing their ability to get hard and stay hard, so to speak. I will never forget the long lived apricot trees I saw growing in the high desert of New Mexico at almost a mile elevation. Self seeded and never irrigated- naturalized trees
That’s what Tippy mentioned too. Juliets were much lighter production than our mature Balaton cherries, but it was their first year, so it’s a bit hard for me to tell how they will eventually shake out. I was pleased with the size. The flavor is tart, but some people still ate them fresh and liked them. For a fresh eating tart cherry, Danube and Jubileum are much better. Still not as sweet as a sweet cherry, but sweet enough to eat off the tree.
I think that’s right. But my guess is that you are in a very unique place for installing instant bearing fruit trees at a high price point. I remember you once posted a photo of a trailer of large fruit trees which you were able to charge something like $18K+/-. That was mind blowing. I just can’t imagine being able to do something like that in KS or MO.
I think the fruit tree nursery business here is pretty low margins in most cases. But my only evidence is my own experience. We graft a lot of our own fruit trees. By the time we grow the rootstocks, graft the trees, take care of the trees to get them to a size to move, it’s about as cheap to buy them wholesale. We pretty much only graft our own because the varieties we want to multiply aren’t always available.
Growing fruit for sale does kind of suck compared to many other things one could do to earn a living. That said apples don’t fail very often here. It’s peaches which are really hit and miss. But that’s the big seller here.
Demand for tart cherries has been really weird. We put in Balaton cherry trees about a decade ago. The cherries hold really well on the tree. It would take about 3 weeks for people to come out and pick them all. But over the years demand has ramped up a lot. Last year we sold all the cherries off those trees in two days. It was crazy. We ran out of parking and had people parking in the field. People freeze them and use them all year. Something I wouldn’t have predicted. But as you mention, they aren’t available in stores.
Our peaches got hit by the Dec. freeze, but the biggest event was a very late spring freeze. Even some of the apples have frost rings because the freeze was so late.
The Midwest, in general, is still in an economic funk, but all over the country there are regions with a lot of upper middle class folks who take their landscapes seriously. There is a market for bearing age fruit trees in many places… the trick is marketing them and letting people know you have a superior product to what they can purchase for much less money in small pots at a big box.
My wife could get me that publicity, but my nursery is a smallish part of my business- maybe 20% of my total profits and I have no interest in running a retail nursery operation while I still have the physical strength to prune and otherwise manage the orchards of my particular demographic- mostly multi-millionaires- people who usually don’t even request estimates for installations or maintenance because of my rep. . .
Incidentally, that truck of trees went to someone in N. Carolina, which is a state that’s gotten much richer in the last few decades. I probably should have my son set up a web-site for me- the purchaser’s personal manager had to look hard to find me- at the moment I have a surplus of very nice, bearing age apple trees. I could fill that damn truck twice and still have decent inventory. That N.C. customer didn’t lose a single tree and half were bare root with the roots surrounded by wet leaves and in very large woven but waterproof bags used for selling hundreds of pounds of fertilizer. They are also used for certain fancy mason products. That is a method commercial nurseries do not use, but imagine how much expense it saves by not shipping huge balls of soil. They get a lot more root in the bargain as well, but have to plant them expediently.
Yes, I’m writing this to give you some ideas. Peach trees do not BandB well and there’s a huge market for larger ones that are seldom available… even at huge specialty nurseries. You could grow them in 2-3 years with your skill and climate. You’d probably not do well with bare-root though- your soil’s too heavy but it would be perfect for growing them in Whitcomb bags- the big 21" ones but only filled about 60% full to get a lot of root in not too much soil. My trick. Works almost as well as bare root. You can pop them out of the ground mechanically or with a heavy spade and very quickly My bare roots take some time to manually dig.
I haven’t noticed one way or the other.
Here, where winter temps make for feast or famine cropping on peaches, it’s easy to see the effect this has on vigor. Cropping lowers the angle of the limbs, leading to more flower production. In spur types, the morphology of the limbs changed too. Whether or not this translates into a smaller tree in the long run is an open question, and would depend on any number of things, but it’s going to take a lot longer to get that big if it’s energy is going into cropping instead of purely vegetative growth.
My apologies olpea, I’m slightly late responding…still trying to get the hang of navigating things.
So every time I talk to Jason (my classmate who works at Saunders) I haven’t gotten in to varieties of cherries. It’s been pretty much peach and apple varieties I’ve asked him about because if I venture into another fruit it would be apples. I’ve worked for a few (3 to be precise) orchards that grew cherries… unfortunately the one that was the worst at growing cherries was the one my college owned…and I went to an agricultural college. The other two grew tart cherries and they were guessing as much as they were working from a solid background.
So the answer I never specified sweet or tart because I never actually asked Jason about sweet or tart cherries, I would just ask a generic answer like 'how’d the sweet cherries do)
At one time I had 6 different sweet cherry trees. They just all bloomed too early and had trouble pollinating. It seemed like lots of wet cool weather would prevent pollination. I know there are some sweet cherries which are easier to grow, but I haven’t tried them.
Thanks for the thought. I’m not planning to give up selling fruit. I actually enjoy growing and selling fruit, even though it’s easy to read the opposite from my previous post. I’m just down and depressed because we lost most of the peach crop. Last year we sold something like 80,000 peaches. This year we’ll be lucky to sell 8000.
What makes it doubly bad is that had we not pruned most of the trees last fall, the crop would have probably been alright. It would have been light, but still acceptable. I’d gotten by lots of time pruning peaches in the fall, but this time, doing so was disastrous. I calculated it cost me about $70K in lost production, lost trees, and lost time. I’ve been angry enough at myself to jump off a cliff. It’s hard not to look at the trees and get angry at my mistake. I’ve been doing this a long time. How did I not learn this lesson before now?
But I do enjoy selling fruit. I’m friends with a lot of my customers. Some good friends. The same people come back year after year and keep telling me how great our fruit is. That makes a person feel pretty good.
We have made a lot of progress on establishing peach varieties here which are more regular croppers. So I think that should help in the long run, unless the weather gets more wonky. Also there is some very promising research on a compound developed at U of WA (as I recall) which supposedly gives two weeks frost protection to cherries. It’s apparently giving up to 8 degrees protection, though it hasn’t been tested on peaches, that I know of. By 8 degrees protection, I mean it has to get 8 degrees colder for the sprayed trees to have the same loss as the control trees.
I’m really sorry about your loss but somehow comforted to know I’m not the only idiot capable of making big mistakes I should never make. It’s happened enough that I’ve finally learned to forgive my idiocy. So much worse things can happen than losing a years crop.
So when I was learning the ‘correct time to prune’ it was kinda like hitting a moving target.
The ‘professor’ I had for tree fruit production in college (And I’m going back about 18 years now) pretty much said prune apples January through March, peaches March and April, pears at the same time as peaches… everything else he was a little hazy about. The guy had a Master’s degree in weed science (weed as in the pest that invades fields not the THC stuff) and had a forty year career as a cooperative extension agent. Sure cooperative extension agents have their specialties but his was obviously geared towards weed management under a variety of conditions (agronomic crops, diversified farm settings, et cetera.) I should probably cut him some slack.
Fast forward to the working world 
. The plot thickens and things get murkier. Suddenly I go to grower’s conventions and the advice becomes prune cherries (do I have to put in a disclaimer that I ‘m not differentiating between sweet and tart cherries here?) heavily in the summer but if personal experience leads otherwise ease up on summer pruning (though you should still be doing it) in addition to late winter/early spring.
With peaches the advice (this is more from growers I know than convention classes) prune the fairly new growth on peach trees during the summer, stop by September otherwise I’d run the risk of cold damage and don’t even think about pruning again until the second half of March lest the eldest son of each family…sorry wrong story…
Low and behold I paid a visit to an orchard I used to work at (I swear it was well into late summer, past the point where I’d be comfortable pruning) and there’s workers pruning the Laurol trees. My old boss’ words were ‘the Laurols aren’t coloring right, they’re my favorite peach, I know they’ll sell but I can’t sell late peaches.’
And the advice with apple pruning I’ve been able to divine thus far has been the following: on dwarfing rootstocks (B-9, M+9 etc cetera that are known for profusely sprouting from the rootstock) feel free to prune rootstock sprouts starting late November especially if you have people and you need to keep them busy as the harvest slows. In the appropriate hardiness zone growers can get away with pruning apple trees starting sometime in December (I wouldn’t try it, even where my orchard is in Northeast PA the winters have been running too mild lately for me to try pruning apples before Jan 1st)
I guess the answer with pruning comes back to the whole hitting a moving target principle…though I do thing there’s been a lot of research in recent years to fine tune how much prune is acceptable in what time of the year.
This past weekend I got out to where my chestnuts were planted. About half them are dead and of the ones I planted in April that did survive sent out new growth from the roots. Almost all of my black locust and silver maples survived though.
