Birds will certainly eat them before they are ready, you have to net the tree and wait weeks. The do get sweet if allowed to completely ripen.
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Ok- itās hard to imagine them being sweeter! I will have to be way more protective next year.
Hereās my cherry tree this year- lots of dead wood! Not sure what happened! Also, maybe a little baby tree is coming off of the roots??
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That looks like carmine jewell. Make sure you are treating the bush with a fungicide like immunox or captan. CJ will send out suckers like that. Everything iām seeing there is normal. Remove the dead wood and spray with fungicides as needed based on leaf symptoms. The first year will take more sprays. Captan and immunox can be used alternatively. I use both as needed. Have not needed them 99.99% of the time on most things. Cherries need some sprays which is why i limit how many i grow. Ayers pear needs no spray. I like sour cherries but can have a larger orchard if many things are grown spray free.
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They do that, my Romeo pulled that stunt on me, and gave me a ton of saplings in the process. They started sprouting all over the place.
On talking to another grower he told me that this is not uncommon with these. Either stomp the root saplings or transplant them. If you want to transplant them give them a year of growth before you pull them.
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reminds me i have 4 14-16āā romeo suckers i need to dig. love free trees.
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Those four easily turn into twelve if you cut extra root to the left and right of those and sprout them. Getting the roots to push green is super easy
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Why do you stomp the root saplings? Iām new to these bush cherries, but I thought the whole idea was to make a hedge of bush cherries?
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I donāt think yourās are CJ or Romeo. I have both and the fruit is darker but Iām in MT.
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Some people actually complaint that their bushes sprout from the roots. I never understood what the problem was, either transplant it (free bush!) or stump it. Problem solved.
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This page from the University of Saskatchewan is a very useful resource for anyone interested in sour cherries. There are even ripeness cards for each variety to help you out this year. Well worth a look for anyone growing these cherries.
BTW, I love them. They make amazing pies.
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i agree. made my 1st pie from mine last year and it was awesome!
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I think I may have a suckers from one of my trees. Probably the Juliet. The leaves on the sucker, assuming it is one, came up larger than the new leaves the tree so far this year? Is that normal? Iāll take a picture of it tomorrow probably. I was pulling out weeds and almost yanked it. I figure if itās not a free cherry tree I can just kill it later.
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yes they are like that. i sprayed the 1st cherry sucker thinking it was a balsam poplar sucker that grows nearby.
Yup, big leaves is a sign of baby growth. The first time I saw that was a bit of a head scratcher so I dug up and followed the root.
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I have ordered a Juliet cherry tree from HoneyberryUSA. I hope they deliver a live tree. I have had a difficult time finding anything that is not Carmine Jewel. People talk about how lucky we are to have our weather on the West coast, but we are heavily restricted when it comes to importing plants.
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I had heart CA and Hawaii had major restriction but not Washington. Here it is weird because places like Raintree, One Green World and Bay Laurel will ship stone fruit but places like Gurneys refuse to.
Even though my Carmine Jewel and Juliet have abundant blossoms,there has never been much interest from bees.It doesnāt really affect the fruiting,as that is plentiful also.
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How is your Juliet fruit? I try to be realistic about what I can grow, so I only have a White Gold cherry so far. I am hoping Juliet will do well for pies and tarts. My White Golds have been coming in at 18-19 Brix, but it is still a pretty young tree.
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In the early years- the first 5 or so, my Romance cherries would do that a LOT. I never lost a whole tree, but Iād have very large segments, sometimes about 1/2 the tree, that would just die without any known cause. Strangely, in the last few years (years 6-10) I havenāt had hardly any dead limbs. I didnāt change anything I do or put on them or anything else. So hopefully yours will just grow out of this sectional death like mine did! Iād love to hear if others experience this, and if so did it get better as trees got older?
Also, for what its worth, I have dug up and transplanted 8 root suckers from 3 different Romance cherries and they have done great except they are very slow growers the first 2 yearsā¦especially the first year. The one thing I have learned, and of course this is pretty standard for all tree transplants I suppose, is you absolutely have to dig them up and cut them away from the mother tree during dormancy. Another thing Iāve learned that REALLY helps is that in the summer before I try to transplant some Romance suckers, I will take a shovel and push it deep in the ground all the way around the sucker to make sure I cut it from the main root. Somehow, doing this doesnāt kill it the way it does if I do this and immediately transplant it. I guess it just allows it to not get shock syndrome caused by completely digging it up and moving it to a new place, and this allows it to slowly rely more on its on roots and not just the mother root, and over the last part of summer it develops a stronger, bigger root system independently than it would if it was still relying mostly on a large root from the main tree.
Finally, Iāll just mention that I love a lot of things about the Romance cherries, but they are just soooooo darn sour that it hard for me to love this as much as I otherwise would. Iāve heard others disagree and say they are comparable to Montmorency, but to me they are WAY WAY more sour than Monty!
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