What varieties of cherry have you gotten from GRIN that have since fruited, and how would you rate the cherries against commonly available varieties. Which are real keepers and which do you not rate favorably?
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I have successfully grafted ‘Ideal’ (PI 592858) to krymsk 5 in a container as well as to a ‘Mesabi’ tree outside. No fruit yet, should have blooms this year. I also received ‘Englaise Timpurii’ (PI 592855) and ‘Ukrainische Griotte’ (PI 59286) from GRIN but my grafts failed. I used the same grafting methods for all, so maybe ‘Ideal’ is easier to graft. Ideal is supposed to be late blooming, smaller fruit with higher sugar levels. Hopefully I’ll get to try them this year.
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If you get fruit I would appreciate knowing your opinion of it.
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That makes sense, I had 3 Surefire tart cherry trees on Krymsk. I lost two last year and the other looks bad this year. Other than an apricot, I haven’t lost any other trees for several years. I finally got some gisela rootstocks but they are still too small to graft. I’ll probably try bud grafting the Ideal to one this summer if they get big enough.
I hadn’t heard that, but explains some of my misadventures. I have a couple Evans on Krymsk 5 that are happy, but I had a young meteor on Krymsk die one winter when all the sweet cherries were fine. I believe I also had a few unexpected graft fails of other tart cherries on Krymsk, but that was a few years back and I don’t recall exactly.
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Which Gisela? Where did you buy from out of curiosity?
Gisela 6. Raintree had them last year. They were very small. They don’t have them on their website now, they may have had them earlier this year, I’m not sure. I have 5 of them in stuewe pots, but they didn’t grow much last year.
In 2017, I got a bunch of tart cherry scionwood from GRIN (9 different varieties) and grafted them on two established (multiple branches) Krymsk-5 rootstocks. Grafts seemed to take but then wilted and died, and the rootstocks died with them. Krymsk-5 is very sensitive to prune dwarf virus and necrotic ring spot virus, so I wonder whether that was the reason. This year, I repeated the experiment and grafted scionwood of 6 different tart cherry varieties (once again obtained from GRIN) on Krymsk-5 rootstocks, but each variety on a separate rootstock. I also grafted them on branches of an established Balaton tree that is on Gisela-12 rootstock.
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