Freeze dried berries and tart cherries are great added to stuff like banana bread or muffin batter. They bake up juicy without making the dessert soggy.
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my juliet has been letting older branches die. it did it once last year and it just did it again. it has a ton of fresh growth at the same time so I think it’s happy overall. is this common with these?
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Do the flowers get brown and die,along with the branches?
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no just general die back. this spring it was branches that never woke up, last year it was mid summer
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The dieback is not normal. Maybe because of your warm zone? Developed for zone 2 and 3. I’m in 6a and it does great here. Or maybe it’s some form of blight?
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It is normal to have die back.
Untreated leaf spot will cause it even killing the entire trees frequently. Spray with something like immunox /captan as needed. Sour Cherry Leaf Spot . If i do not spray I lose trees. Friends nearby have lost 20-30 trees this way.
I’m also curious about the flavor, and not very concerned with how sweet they get. I’d love to read comparisons of the flavor of Juliet, Carmine Jewel, Montmorency, etc.
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@clarkinks ,
I think you meant to say, it is not normal for a healthy Juliet to have branches die back but it is normal for a diseased Juliet to have branches die back.
Cherry leaf spot is a common cherry disease. Left untreated, it will affect the tree’s health. Fortunately, it can be easily treated with fungicide. We don’t know for sure yet what problem @z0r ‘s Juliet has.
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After spending a year and a half potted, Juliet was planted in the fall of 2018 and has given only a handful of fruit to date. She was 7 feet tall and in full bloom in early April when 2 frosty nights ended her chance of a good year. She set only a handful of cherries.
Fortunately, her boyfriend Romeo, who is the same age but much smaller, was a little behind in flowering and is now setting what looks to be a good crop. Until now he has produced even fewer cherries than Juliet.
It won’t be the big harvest I’ve been looking forward to, but it will be the best so far. Next year will be the big one…I hope.
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Even in normal years ( no frost, no freeze, etc.), the first couple of years of Juliet flowering (lot of flowers) has not resulted in a lot of fruit set at all.
This has been my and others’ experience up thread as well. @thecityman posted about it, too. I think Juliet (like most fruit trees) needs some maturity to hold on to her fruit.
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Thanks, I believe I was one of the others that posted up thread.
It is a long thread. 
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They mention at the university that branches die back as the bush matures. They say to just prune them out. Suckers should come up to help also. They say the deeply buried bushes have more trunks coming up out of the ground for redundancy to die back it can help save the bushes.
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When I speak of natural processes like tip die back I’m referring to the big picture. Your right to say don’t expect die back if you mean every year. I think your saying you treat your bush with fungicide, and the soil, water and temperature conditions are perfect so you expect no die back. I meant more in general there will be die back in places like Kansas or Canada it is a natural process. Diseases, weather, and age exist so tip die back is only a matter of time. Drying winter winds, hot sun, cold winters, diseases, insects, storms all factors. In my location if it rains excessively and all the foliage is lush and large and then it moves to the other extreme it can cause problems like die back.
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Maybe normal for you to have this, not here, never seen it.
OK that sounds better. That was all I was saying. I may have never seen it because I spray my stone fruit for brown rot and use 2 combinations of fungicide which can handle leaf spot too.
I have Montmorency in another location and it is disease free. Is not ever sprayed. It’s hard to beat that tree. I like all of them and choosing is like saying what child do you like better?
I guess watch the tree and hope it does not progress. It would be nice to know exactly why so one can treat it properly. Also tip dieback I would agree happens, even from cold, but whole branches is concerning.
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Does this happen with Juliet only or all the Romance series?
@Drew51
I also believe spray schedules are different. We don’t spray anything we don’t have to spray. Your approach to spray as a preventive is different than mine where I spray as a cure.
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I didn’t have any issues with leaf spot on carmine jewel until the combination of heavy crops and frequent rains. I have three carmine jewel bushes. The most over cropped bush suffered the most from leaf spot. It lost most of it’s leaves, which stunted the growth of both the bush and the fruit. The bush that had the lowest crop load (normal full load I think), had only a little bit of leaf spot and the fruit size was about as big as I expected (nickel size). This suggest that fruit load affects resistance to leaf spot or genetics are different between my bushes. The later is a real possibility if they have been propagated by seed or some combination of seed and cloning.
I preemptively sprayed for leaf spot last year and had no issue with it.
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Exactly my experience @AJfromElmiraNY. Hormones in the Bush seem to trigger leaf spot susceptibility issues when fruiting. I’m speaking from experience now with carmine Jewell not Juliet. It’s possible it may be completely hormone related but I think we need to look at nutrients also. Heavy fruit load in apples and pears seems to trigger disease as well. Is it any different with any species? Lots of nutrients are used in the production of fruit weakening the plant. Plants under stress often times fruit. Kansas soil seems to naturally lean more towards fruit production and less towards vegetative growth.
maritime pnw zone 8 has super mild summers compared to zone 8 in say texas or florida, I wonder if the “worst freeze zone” maps well enough if usask is really trying to communicate about a “hottest summer limit”. my bush was actually wholesaled by ANI salem, 50 miles away, and funnily they list it as zone 2-7. I assume they grew it there but maybe not:
https://www.alphanursery.com/catalog.html?0=juliet
@clarkinks and others thanks for the disease notes, maybe it has something, that wasn’t even on my mind. it got ziram and lime sulfur this spring but the dieback may have happened last year
ziram is listed as only “fair” for cherry leaf spot and lime sulfur isn’t listed Cherry (Prunus spp.)-Leaf Spot | Pacific Northwest Pest Management Handbooks
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I do agree with @mamuang and @Drew51 on their points which is if everything is perfect no tip die back will occur that year. The tip die back is an indicator something went wrong. Drying winds , lack of water or nutrients , or disease are all suspects. Those are all normal conditions here the same as in Canada. Frequently during harsh Kansas droughts the tips die back even on my ultra hardy blackberries. Would a cherry be more hardy? Canada has similar climate to Kansas in many ways which is why I enjoy growing their fruits. They are called prairie cherries for a reason. Canada is much colder in some parts of the country but otherwise very similar.
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