All my Juliet’s fruit did that this year and the plant is still young.bb
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Mine planted in 2017 so it is relatively young but it still is frustrating to see. Its abundant blooms created a false hope 
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I have 2 Juliets and had they same fruit drop as you are experiencing @mamuang. I can’t remember if they were planted in 2016 or 2017, but they are both taller than my CJ cherries which are loaded. CJ cherries just dropped a few early that were tiny and clearly not pollinated, but Juliet had some like that and then a whole other batch (maybe 50% or more) that went red early before getting much size and then dropped. Hopefully they’ll grow out of it.
I got a few small bowl fulls from the Juliets last year, not enough to do much with but enough to taste. While they are sweeter, I actually think I like the cherry taste better with the CJ cherries. I should get a bigger sample of Juliets this year and I’ll see if that first impression stands. So for fresh eating, I guess the Juliets will be better for many because of the higher brix, but we kind of like the sour CJ cherries to snack on as we walk by the bushes and then mostly use them for cooking. So if I was to do it again, I’d just go all CJ. For their size, CJ cherries are just production machines! And I just love those pies, muffins, scones and …
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I have a 2 year old graft of CJ that bloomed this year. It has already set a few cherries, definitely more precocouis that dear Juliet.
I hope these cherries will survive to maturity so I can compare taste. I like sweet fruit, in general.
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you’re getting me hungry for some! i hope to at least taste some this year but I’m not holding my breath from what you guys are saying. i have a cj , 2 juliet , romeo and montmorency that are all 5-5.5 ft. and 4 years old. the Juliet’s are loaded with blooms and the mont. has a few doz. funny though not a 1 on the cj. maybe i mislabeled 1 as i had 1 juliet i thought had died and i went and bought another the same spring. well the dead one sent up a new sprout 1 week after planting the 2nd one so the dead one might be the one that isn’t fruiting yet. they’re all planted near each other so its possible i mixed them up.
Duplicate-Pls remove
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from everything I’ve read about them, the colder and harsher the environment , the better they grow. like rhubarb , currants and honey berries they don’t like the heat and humidity. could be why you’re having issues with them. besides currants and elders, they are the most vigorous trees i grow.
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So… for years and years I’ve watched people talk about the Romance Cherries and how well they grow and how much they produce. I’ve seen all the amazing photos of the bushes and the heaping bowls of fruit that came from them and so on. Meanwhile I’ve had my 3 varieties for 6 years now and its always the same story- mine grow incredibly slow, took about 4 years to produce a hand full of cherries, which they always just dropped onto the ground. Several years I’ve had a whole limb- BIG ONES, like 1/4 of my tree just up and die for no known reason. In short, I’ve been very disappointed…UNTIL NOW!!!
My Juliet (by far the largest most productive of the 3) is on its 6 leaf and is about 6.5 foot and very bushy. This year it had so many blooms that it looked like a giant snowball. It fruited like crazy and I started waiting for them to fall…BUT THEY DIDN"T!!!
SO for the first time ever, I GET IT! I’d post photos but I netted it today so its hard to show how much fruit it has. The few I’ve tasted so far seem to be about the same level of sweet/sour as a good montmorency. But I’ll be getting a LOT more fruit from this 6-7 foot tree than from my 11-12 foot Montmorency tree. These fruit are just PACKED on this thing.
So, it took it 6 years for me to get fruit and my tree grew slower than most do apparently. But now iget it and I hope the rest of you have good experiences as well in the years to come if you haven’t already.
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@thecityman,
So, it took that long to settle and produce!!! Longer than my peaches, plums, apples and even my pears.
Thanks for your input.
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I killed my Romeo cherry by moving it last spring while it was in bloom. It lingered and died a slow death last summer and was green going into fall, but it did not wake back up this spring. The roots were pretty rotten on the Romeo. It might have been too wet with us watering our yard last year to establish the grass. I ripped it out and replaced it with a Shenandoah pear.
My Juliet bloomed about 1/3 of what I’d call a full bloom. It got hit by our 22F freeze so lost quiet a few flowers to that. But I think I have some cherries, no more than a handful. It is in its 4th leaf, I think. Both Romeo and Juliet came as tiny, <1/8 dia 10" bareroot plants in fall of 2016.
The Juliet is a handsome plant. It has glossy dark green foliage.
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My Juliet is at a rental, so I’ll take a pic of it next time I go over to do the lawn (should be as soon as I get some time without rain, as it’s been about 2 weeks since the last mowing).
Here is a pic from two mowings ago. Last time, I think I glanced at it and noticed a lot of small fruit. But, based on what everyone else is saying, I’m guessing it falls off.
I just planted last spring, so it is probably too much to expect much production now. But it is growing well and had plenty of flowers. The fence in the pic should be at about 4’, so it has grown just over that mark. Not bad for a plant I picked up in a grocery store (Stew Leonard’s).
My oldest Carmine Jewel and Crimson Passions got very overgrown and I killed one of the CP by attempting a transplant. The other CP and the CJ both got pruned back severely. I’ve also got 3-4 which I’m not sure if they are CP or CJ. Next time I go past, I’ll take a survey of what kind of fruit they are holding. A couple of the unknowns are at another property.
My Romeo had a decent fruit load the other day, but who knows if it will last.
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Tippy, I’m sure it was the unexpected late freezes here that knocked my CJ and Juliet fruit back, 2 separate freeze events that hit 25 here. After a very heavy bloom and during last of the petal drop the freezes hit, so the large crop I expected is now down to 10% of what it should have been. Probably unrelated but both had growth spurts afterwards, the Juliet grew 2 ft straight up to hit 8ft and leggy and the CJ grew out 2 ft all around, now 7 ft and a huge green ball blocking light from the Juliet. I didn’t really expect huge mature plants and didn’t intend to do any pruning on them but I’ll have to now just to get them back into manageable shape.
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Yes, it would appear my Juliet was just slow but fortunately it did, eventually, prove itself this year. I’ve seen enough photos from others here to know that mine grew slower and produced later than those other people here have. Six years is much longer than many people had to wait…but now that I made it here it feels like it was worth it. THis is a nice healthy tree with a huge, dense fruit load and they are very good to eat,
NOW…what about these darn birds? HOLY COW do they love these cherries- more than anything else I grow. Its just insane. I have a complete net over over one, and the birds just land outside the net and fish around with their heads and pluck ever cherry within a few inches of the net, crazy. ALso, I let my net just fall to the ground under the tree, until one morning I watched a bird actually lift up the bottom of the net off the ground with his beak, and then walk under it until he was inside the net. Clever bird! I went over to the net ad of course the bird panicked and couldn’t find his way back out and I was able to grab him. We’ll let the story end there out of respect to the squeamish. ha. After that I tied up the bottom on the net now. My point is birds go crazy for these cherries!!! You’ve all been warned. 
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Juliet, 2nd yr in my yard, first time flowering. The handful of cherries turned red and fell off, must be too soon for the plant to be able to hold onto them.
I’ve thought about trapping birds, just like 4 legged varmint, but I figured that it wouldn’t do any good they are too mobile and more would continuously fly in…
I had a leaking faucet handle to fix first which delayed me (far longer than I planned, as it involved 3 trips to the hardware store…), so it was dark when I finished mowing. But it looks like there are still some fruit hanging on the 2nd year Juliet:
Here’s a better pic of the CJ/CP from my yard. It looks like a lot of them stayed tiny and will likely fall off soon. But, there are some which are sizing up and may stick.
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You are 100% correct. I’m trying hard not to offend any of our animal rights friends by being too graphic or detailed, but I will tell you that I have pretty well proven that you can’t “remove” enough birds- be it by trapping as you considered or by shooting them with a .22 as I may or may not have done in large numbers this year, the result would be the same…dozens of birds removed from the cherry tree area with absolutely no detectable decrease in number of birds or missing cherries. In other words, I don’t think its a problem you can trap or kill your way out of…too many birds are too mobile and others just come in as replacements, just as you theorized.
Also, just so you know, all my Romance cherries had a lot of baby cherries that never got any larger and just turned red (not a ripe kind of red) and fell off just like in your photo. Most years almost all the cherries on my trees did that. Then last year a few sized up and ripened, and this year most of them did- but I still have a lot of the little guys that just fall off. I assume they didn’t get pollinated but I don’t know that for sure.
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Just one more anecdote, my young Juliet cherries are showing the save behavior. They set what looked like an insane crop from such small bushes, but then most of them never sized up even though they did develop some color. Some are still on the bushes but many just dropped off.
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I’m afraid something like that happens with raccoons for me. No matter how many I eliminate, there are always more which are happy to jump into the trap. At its peak, I think I got maybe a dozen in a 1 month period last year. I caught one 4 days ago with a moldy half bagel and a bit of peanut butter. The day before, they were smart enough to get the first half of the bagel out of the trap without setting it off. This time I staked the bagel down to add some challenge and got one. Then, the next 2 days, I caught raccoons without even baiting the trap- just put it back and open it up. How are they smart enough to snag the first half bagel, but dumb enough that 2 of them go in looking for more? “Hmm…there used to be a bagel here, but I don’t see it…let’s nose around for it…hey!”
I think that is sometimes why they drop. Other times, it could be some sort of a disease issue. Here’s a pic of my Monmorency today, which I think is more likely disease (brown rot? I’ve had it on blossoms before).
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haha. That is so funny about the raccoons going into an unbaited trap!
The cherries in your photo aren’t doing what I was describing happen to mine. Mine do exactly what i can see in the first photo you posted in the earlier post. THey stay really small, turn red, and fall off.
BTW…THis year I got to try Juliet, Romeo, and Carmine Jewel and by far the best and sweetest were Juliet. Better than montmorency too. And a higher yield per square foot of plant.
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@BobVance,
I think you have brown rot and probably brown rot blossom blight, too.
By the way, do you set a trap out at night? If I put peanut butter out during the day, chipmunks and squirrels would get to it first.
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