I have my first crop of Nanking cherries this year. They are small but plentiful. I think I started eating them a little early as they are clearly better as the days go by. For some reason the birds haven’t bothered them.
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I got my first real crop this year too. I enjoy the flavor. They are not as tart as I expected. Unfortunately they are tedious to eat due to the small size and large pit relative to the size. They also are slow picking. They dont come off the bush ad easy as blueberries. My son and I picked about a half gallon today and it seemed to take forever. Im sitting on my deck eating them as we speak but admitly Im rather impatient and find myself shoving a handful of them in my mouth and working around the seeds.
The flavor sort of reminds me of pomegranate and autumn berry. Mine appear to be a little darker than Jim’s.
Bird do not seem to bother mine either.
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Heavy nanking cherry production this year! We are picking gallons of them! They turn ripe at the same time as gooseberries, carmine jewell, juneberries, and mulberries. Bushes are covered thanks to the heavy rain this year!
Ridiculous production today! There is still fruit coming in! (Carmine jewell cherries are now at 6 gallons and counting)
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As per usual the ruskies have done a lot of work in soviet times with these. Here’s a link for you to gawk at, all the registered cultivars of Nankings and a lot of info on each one:
Just google translate the whole site, that’s what I did.
I am getting via difficult channels the cultivars “Alice” and “Natalie”, I am very optimistic that these could be real value to our Finnish edible landscaping. I have two seedling nankings with me already, one red and one white, and for the taste I can easily say that they are way sweeter than our average sour cherry. So if these bigger ones taste somewhat good, I shall totally propagate them.
Videos are hard to find, but I think this one shows bigger berries than what are in my wild bushes:
Overall it is facinating how unpenetrable the old Iron Curtain seems to be, soooo many incredible cultivars of mulberries, cherries, apples, haskaps etc. etc. just wait in the old Soviet lands that the westerns just don’t know anything about. That’s why it is so much fun to read russian forums and find out things 
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it is sad that it takes decades before a Russian bred plant is released here in the U.S. you folks in europe get them slightly faster than we do. and usually its only plants deemed commercially productive that are brought in. i too have a red and white nanking but also have the romance series of sour cherry from University of Saskatchewan, CA which in general is a bigger and more richly flavored cherry. i also have a lutowka polish morello cherry and a montmorency sour cherry. i should get some cherries off the romance series cherries next year.
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Kiitos! That site is great! I usually look for chinese or Japanese sites to translate, they have so much information on growing a huge variety of plants. I will have to start looking at Russian sites! And I thank Finland for the Hinnomaki Red gooseberry-I love that cultivar!
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Oh dear, you made me blush with the first word almost <3 . We have not contributed really many cultivars to the world, but at least few gooseberries. And we do have two thornless flowering quinces for producing fruit.
By the way, now that I have the possibility, it frustrates to see the gooseberrys name slightly altered almost everywhere. It is supposed be HinnoNmaki red, in Finnish “Hinnonmäen punainen”, Hinnonmäki being the place. Almost all for some reason drop the middle n away. I can understand that the umlauts on top of the letter a (ä) are left away, haha, but somewhere there is an official catalogue that misspells Hinnonmäki as Hinnomaki .
Just a rant, I really do love that I can be of assistance.
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I love hearing the real name-It makes more sense to me to hear the real Finnish name-I have been to Finland many times to visit my friends who were exchange students here in the US in the 80’s- unfortunately they do not grow plants. I will now tag my bushes with the real Finnish name!
Thanks a bunch for doing the tagging. It may seem to many a miniscule thing, but to a native speaker it makes my teeth hurt 
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Nankings are blooming, spring must be just around the corner.
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I can smell Spring in the air today. We hit hit 62 degrees up here in Michigan today and with the warm rain tonight my snow might be gone tomorrow. I can’t wait.
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These don’t seem to grow well here in the PNWet. They get diseases during our long, wet, not very cold Springs. I wish they did grow well, though.
John S
PDX OR
Anyone have any Nanking cuttings they can share?
Love your fencing.
Apparently I need to put up fencing around my Nanking cherries. Rabbits munched them hard over the last couple of days. (Odd, because they had pretty much ignored them in previous winters, and this year wasn’t unusually rough around here.)
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