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I’m sure I can find something.
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That sounds interesting! You have seedlings? PM about it we are hijacking this thread, sorry!
To sort of stay on topic my Romance series today.
Carmine Jewel. This tree has stayed small, which is fine with me, I don’t have a ton of room for it.
Juliette first year of full flowers (3rd leaf). A little ahead of Carmine
Last year I was gifted a Wowza, which is from the Canadian breeding program. Gardens Alive got a couple unnamed cultivars releasing this one for now.
Well last year I planted in spring and in the fall I ran it over with the lawn mower! Yes, I know! Well it’s making a comeback this spring.
Off topic but interesting I have an Indian Free tree nearby and it’s loaded with necatarine and pluot grafts
The pink branch on the left is Indian Free, the rest is pluots and 2 nectarines Arctic Jay and Fantasia. This tree has been kept at 6 feet tall.
Another view
So this tree has 6 cultivars. I won’t add anymore. So far easy peasy managing it.
The left scaffold is split into three sub-scaffolds. The middle into two sub-scaffolds
And the right is all Fantasia nectarine. The tree is 6 feet tall and 8 years old.
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Last years 4” starts of Juliet have sized up to 4’ Romeo which was larger when planted last year Set fruit. Just got a few more carmine Jewels off Amazon for MD Gifts. $25 ea shipped which were impressive. I think the stock came from Gurneys.
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i have a romeo that size that had a few cherries on it last year and something ate them. hopefully its loaded this year and i get to taste them.
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My Juliet has a graft of Crimson Passion on it. (CP is known to be very stingy with blooms) and a graft of Carmine Jewel on it.
CJ graft has flowers but they are not yet open. Juliet is in full bloom ahead of CJ.
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I see the little fence there. Do rabbits damage the cherries?
Rabbits eat bark, mostly of young trees. That can be deadly to trees if they eat all around the trunk. In fact, a rabbit just ate my peach seedling to the ground yesterday. It ate 1/3 of my young pear tree last year. Fortunately, the tree has survived.
This Juliet is relatively young. I don’t want to risk it.
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Nice looking tree! My Juliet is not really there yet, but I like it’s growth pattern.
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Yours looks nice. How old is it? Mine was planted in 2017 from Gurney.
Mine was planted on a mound. It is about 5ft tall now. I won’t let it get to 8 ft because it would block the sun from Honey Crisp and Korean Giant behind it.
6 ft or no more than7’ at most. I let Juliet fully ripe last year. It still tasted sour to me. I don’t need a lot of them.
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It is a year younger (2018). Last year it produced a few flowers and no fruit.
I’m running into problems like this. My CJ slowed in growth which is great as I too need to keep it about where it is at now. Here is my CJ and it’s a lot older. Well at least 2 years, I think 3 years older.It has not really grown much which is great! I like it as is!
I agree. I have three trees and that is plenty. I do love the flavor of sour cherry though. It needs to be processed. Not really for fresh eating. If you must eat tart cherries fresh, try drying them.
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Do you guys know what’s wrong with my romeo? It’s the 2nd year and we had some flowers in April. A few actually looked like they are developing fruits but they all dropped today. Few weeks ago, we noticed some tiny yellow new leaves shooting out from branches and they dropped too.
They do that till about year four. Then you can get a little bit of fruit and more every year after providing nothing else is affecting the bush like weather, wildlife or disease. They can get a brown spot disease where little brown dots appear on the leaves that turn to holes. Then the leaves can turn yellow and drop in sever cases. Cherry Leaf Spot | Ohioline Yellow leaves in general mean to wet or to dry of soil. You’ll have to dig a little to check.
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i sprayed all 6 of mine with immunox a few days ago to hopefully prevents stuff like this. i also put in a adirondack gold apricot last spring that came with shot hole disease so I’m spraying that too as i don’t want it to spread to my cherries. though i haven’t seen WPBR on my currants i spray them also as a precaution. seen some yellow leaves on a few of my cherries and also had some flowers that aborted but the leaves fixed themselves. i figured id lose the flowers as most of my cherries are less than 4 yrs. old.
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Yes especially on their own roots do need a good 4 years. The 5th year should be better.
My sweet cherry produced well White Gold, and the grafted Utah Giant is a cherry making machine. I had a few cracked Utah Giant cherries last year, and man they were good. They crack though like any super hard cherry and these cherries are rock hard. Hopefully it will stay dry this harvest. The grafts produced cherries the 2nd year. I took 4 scion from the existing graft and converted more of the tree over to Utah, all took too.
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I’m out of immunox at the moment but will get more. I did spray twice this spring once with immunox and once with indar. Once my apples are done I will spray again with indar and Triazicide. I bought a 25 gal sprayer that hooks to my tractor. It works great but I put more spray out than I do with my pump sprayers but then again I cant spray my pump sprayer to the tops of my big trees but I can with the electric one. I can pretty much get all my trees except for the ones up close to the house while driving. My orchard only uses about 15 gallons so I don’t need to fill it all the way up. I spray everything while it’s hooked up. It goes a lot better than my pump sprayers. I have filled it full of water in droughts and can water with it too while still driving I can hit all my potted plants and trees even by the house because I’m not worried about over spray. Anyway I have always sprayed my cherry bushes while spraying my trees.
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A quick question for those growing romance cherries: would they be suitable (or has anyone tried) to grow them in a restricted form? I have a good spot against a fence, about 6ft wide, but not much depth. Could you grow them as a fan or simply tie branches to espalier wires?
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Sure, just prune them back. They are fairly slow growers compared to regular cherries.
I have a couple Juliet fruits hanging now, curious if I get any to ripeness. The CJs are ripening now, they are much more reliably precocious. All my bush cherries are small though, it will be a long time before they are giving me a decent harvest.
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I sincerely don’t want to be the party pooper on a pro-romance cherries thread, and they certainly have a lot of great attributes and I enjoy them. But this was my first year to get from from Romeo and Juliet and I was a little disapointed at how sour they are! Somehow I got it in my head that they were supposed to be a little sweeter than most sour cherries. I knew they were in the sour class but thought they were reported to be on the sweeter end of the spectrum. Perhaps I just misunderstood or had bad information or got mixed up. But the reality was that these things were REALLY SOUR…VERY sour! ha. Yes, I let them hang a LONG time until they got quite dark- so that wasn’t it. Today I picked my first Montmorency Cherries for the year and they were decidedly sweeter. In fact, I still had some very ripe Juiets so I tried them and Montmorency together and it wasn’t even close.
Please don’t get me wrong- I am still a fan of Romance. Very Much. The were great in preserves and with a little extra sugar I’m sure they’d make a good pie, so its not a big problem. But I could never just sit and enjoy them out of hand, but I can with Montmorency (even though they are still quite sour).
The Romance cherries have other great things about them though. I bet they produce 3 times as much fruit per square foot of bush/tree as any of my other cherries. My Juliet was loaded in way I couldn’t believe- and that is just fun to see and enjoy as well as being productive. SO I’m a big fan. Just wanted others to know these guys are pretty sour!
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Whoops, well I feel kind of dumb now getting a Juliet with the expectation of having a sweeter Montmorency. Ah well, well see how it turns out.