I can’t answer your question, but as a bystander, I also want to know the answer to your question — are your Montmoncery cherries different/worse from other Montmoncery cherries due to some kind of issue with soil, fertilizer, watering, etc — rather than the debate btwn sweet and sour cherries! It seems like a genuinely tough epistemological challenge, because you’d need a kind of Montmoncery sommelier to be able to come and taste and tell the difference from other trees of the same cultivar.
I have a lapins cherry … started in 2018 and so far has bloomed some but failed to hold fruit to ripening.
I added some grafts of Montmorency cherry to it spring 2023… and this spring some of those bloomed and set fruit.
One of those ripened nicely.
It was beautiful… only 1… it turned red several days before it got soft… i put an organza bag on it to keep the birds off it… and let it hang about a week until I could tell it had softened up some.
I picked it and split that little cherry 3 ways… my wife and son wanted a taste too.
It was delicious, quite tart as expected, good cherry flavor and some sweetness in there too. I could tell they are going to be something I will enjoy eating fresh… and they should make some awesome low sugar chia jam too.
The tart/sweet mix on it was similar to a loganberry that is in the early purple stage.
We loved our small sample.
I planted a montmorency cherry at my new home location this spring. It is growing nicely. Cant wait to try more of those.
TNHunter
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Your montmorency pie cherries are going to be smaller than sweet cherries from a grocery store. Pie cherries are just smaller. That being said, the cherries on my trees got bigger when I biocharred them. Still not as big as a sweet cherry, but bigger than before.
JohN S
PDX OR
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