Nanking Cherry Uses

You need to completely remove all the dead branches. and the remaining ones give a haircut. still, plenty of time to get new growth for next years. Then you need to treat the branches with copper no later then 2 days after leaf drop. and again, in spring before budbreak.

You’re going to want to remove dropped leaves and not use them for compost. At least not prunus

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The good news is that most people don’t prune their Nanking cherries enough and then complain that they grow lanky. You have to cut them back by a lot so they are forced to branch out into a proper bush.

my nankings usually have a decent enough form. if anything they wind being a little dense rather than lanky. the problem is i can’t usually justify doing THAT much pruning on them. they’re supposed to be kinda easy. i dont think the fruit warrants intensive management, not that i wind up doing much of that on anything. but if i did, it wouldn’t be on nankings!

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Chopping the branches once or twice in the life of the bush isn’t much of a chore. If you grow one from baby size they tend to get lanky. All it takes is to prune them back all around.

Sand cherries and a few others are like that.

yes, sand cherries get lanky quickly here, but nanking bushes right out for me. might have to do with growing conditions i expect

I think Nanking cherries are too soft to be picked with a blueberry rake. One method that might speed things up would be to cut branches into short lengths, put them in a plastic tub in a freezer, and once frozen, shake the tub well, which will knock off cherries and leaves. Pick out the stems and winnow the cherries in front of a fan. I’ve done this with seaberries. It’s really not that much trouble.

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I recently wrote a blog post about Nanking cherries (EASY CHERRIES – Lee Reich ) in which I wrote: “Nanking cherries are resistant to just about all insect and disease problems, except one that causes occasional wilting and dieback of some stems. It’s a bacterial streaming disease that lives inside tissue. The situation was getting so bad here, probably due to a weakening effect that freak heavy freeze, that I decided to lop all the stems to ground level, and cart them off site, to drastically reduce inoculum. Since then, and it’s been a number of years, plants are doing fine”

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that type of nanking pruning i can handle!