An update for 2017. I’m in zone 3 so things are later here, and this past week I’ve been dealing with my harvest of UofS bush cherries. 2016 was my first big harvest year so I was thinking the production might back off for 2017, but that was not the case. Carmine Jewel was first to ripen, and yielded 31.0 pounds from a 6-ft bush. Juliet was the biggest producer, with 42 pounds of fruit from a single bush! The bush started out at about 6 or 7 feet tall in the spring, but that weight of fruit dragged it down to 5 feet or less. No broken branches, and the bush seems to be rebounding now that I’ve picked the fruit. Cupid was about 20 pounds but up to half of that was lost due to some yet unknown insect or disease, which affected Cupid only. Romeo was about 20 pounds. Total production from 4 bushes was over 110 pounds. Yikes.
wow… that sounds like a lot. What is the best in taste for you?
Juliet and Cupid are easy to eat a lot of, but they don’t really taste like sweet cherries, they are more like a slightly tart berry that has a non-descript flavor. The cherry flavor really only comes out when these are cooked or prepared for things like pies.
Carmine Jewel and Romeo are very tart to eat fresh… far too tart for my taste. But again, the cherry taste comes out when these are cooked, and a bit of sugar goes a long way to cut their tart flavor.
Don,
How long does it take before Juliet starts to produce? year 3?
My cherry trees produce by year 3( a bit) and more after that.
Juliet is my first bush cherry planted this spring. It has grown well so far.
Thanks for the report, that’s a LOT of cherries. Glad to hear Juliet is OK to eat fresh. My plant has been doing great. It was a 2ft plant with big roots when planted, and is now about 4ft tall. My Romeo wasn’t as big when planted, and the beetles just about defoliated it. Hope it can come out of it next year. Odd, the Juliet didn’t suffer hardly any beetle damage 10ft away.
Do you have a Crimson Passion bush as well? I’m curious to see how folks’ CP have done this year, as we also planted one of those this spring. It was a tiny sprig (~6in?), and struggled to get going, but is about 1-2ft tall now.
I planted my Juliet as about a 1.5 foot tall plant in 2011. It produced a small amount of cherries probably most years since then (just a handful most years). It wasn’t until 2016 that it produced its first big crop, about 20-25 pounds. I was expecting it to take a bit of a break this year, but instead it cranked out 42 pounds. Crazy.
Glad to hear your Juliet is doing well. I am not growing Crimson Passion as I wanted to grow only the really dark-colored cherries. From reading the internet, seems a lot of people are finding that CP is much lower-yielding than expected.
Thank you for your response. It would be wonderful if mine set some fruit next year. It was 2.5 ft when planted bare root in the spring. It has grown at least a foot. Still, it is a small bush
VERY impressive Don! 42 lbs of bigger, and a little sweeter fruit than CJ sounds very good to me! I’m looking forward to maybe getting a taste from mine next year.
I picked Juliette at a u pick for the first time this year. They had all of the U of S cherries and we went thru and taste tested them before we chose what variety we wanted to pick. The Juliette, for me, was hands down the winner. Large fruit, and beautiful flavour.
Thanks, but I spoke too soon. I was checking them out today, and noticed that the Juliet had a lot more leaves missing than I thought. Still, it’s in better shape than the Romeo.
I wish Honeyberryusa sold Cupid, I might’ve tried that instead of Crimson Passion. I don’t know of any other US vendor that sells it.
But, who knows, our CP might do OK, got to give it a chance. Like I said, it’s doing a lot better now than after it was planted.
It’s cold enough here for CJ and Juliet to do well. I just put in a Juliet, thanks for the reports. Sounds like a winner to me. All you need is some patience.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good, but inexpensive place to buy a juliet cherry tree?
HoneyberryUSA had better prices than Gurney’s last fall when I ordered. (For fall planting.) My Juliet was pretty small but it has almost caught up to a 2x as big Romeo now
i like honeyberryusa also. harttmanns has good prices too.
Thanks for the report. I have three Juliet bushes. The two I bought from Henry Fields and planted this year grew about two foot and look better than any of the bushes I planted last year from Honey Berry USA. Their leaves are dark green with glossy look to them. My CP is still a bit bigger, but not much. The Juliet’s are thicker. The red dots I had on CP in the spring fell off. There is holes in the leaves where they were, and they haven’t showed back up, so that’s good! I wanted to plant more bushes, but I think eight will be plenty. I have three Juliet, three CJ, one Romeo, and one CP. I’m just worried about the wildlife getting them before me.
@subdood_ky_z6b
You can’t get Cupid or Valentine in the US.
I have to correct myself. I was just looking at the bushes and one of the Juliet’s has grown to about 56" with a sucker coming up from the ground that’s about 42" tall. This bush is my biggest and it was just planted this year. The CP is about 48".
I have had problems with the size of the honeyberry USA bushes vs my voracious deer. I wished I’d gotten the Henry Fields version to have something bigger. My HBUSA bushes I planted this spring are not much over a foot tall still. I have managed so far to keep the deer off at least, so hopefully they will put on some big growth next year. The only good thing is they sent me an extra Juliet, the plants were small and I guess they felt bad.
I got 3 large juliet bushes form HBUSA this spring, they were each 4’ + tall. I think they sold out of them tho. I also planted some sticks I got from them last year and they are each over 2ft now so doing pretty good. I suppose any animal damage can be tough on small plants tho…
I got a Romeo and Juliet from HBUSA in the fall, in early Nov. and planted them in the ground then. Romeo was about 24" tall and Juliet was a twisted stick about 6" tall. They overwintered here fine though we had a mild, but almost snowless winter. Now Juliet is the same size as Romeo and still growing, but Romeo has stopped. They are in the same hole. Both are about 30" tall now.
I have not planted bare-roots in the fall, but it looks like these did just fine. Not too surprising considering they are way hardier than Zone 5.
My Juliet and CJ came from Henry Fields this march. They were very nice. After an initial growth spurt they seem to have stopped growing at a time when everything else is growing like gangbusters. They were hit really hard by Japanese beetles so maybe that stunted them a bit. They seem healthy enough, just not thriving like I thought they would. I don’t want to give them any fert this late in the summer.