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
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!
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.
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.
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”