Pictures of your North Star and Montmorency cherry please. Bonus points for Gerardi Mulberry!

So I did a little impulse buy a few weeks back and bought two sour cherries along with a Gerardi Dwarf Mulberry to see if they will work in my area. I’m trying to figure out where in the world these things will fit.

If you have one or both of these, please post some pictures here. I’m curious if I can place the Montmorency cherry between some blackberry bushes against a north side wall and maybe the North Star by my patio along the same wall in a bit tighter spot. This is all dependent on its growth pattern/vigor. Each location gets 5+ hours of morning into mid afternoon light from spring to late fall.

Y’all think the mulberry would survive an area that tends to get a little swampy in heavy rains? It’s dry as a bone during summer. Gets a bit of free water from the neighbor’s sprinklers.

North Star, planted in 2011. It is really tiny for me, no pruning to keep small. It looks like large bonsai! :grin:

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Is that tulle that is sewn together? Brady

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No, tulle doesn’t stand a season on the tree. It is this: https://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Barrier-Hunting-Netting-Protect/dp/B01G79PNCW/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1524853531&sr=8-20&keywords=Mosquito+Bug+Insect+Bird+Net+Barrier
Good stuff.

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I had a North Star for years. It got bacterial blight and I had to cut it down. However, I still have photos of it that I will post below.

I may have a shot of Montmorency from Door County, WI when we picked cherries there while on vacation one year. My wife thought I was ‘nuts’ as we had already harvested the
cherries in our home orchard 2 weeks earlier. I just couldn’t pass up the experience of picking Montmorency from a commercial orchard.

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Thanks y’all! Anyone else?

the introductory photo on @Livinginawe 's webpage is a ~3 yr old gerardi mulb

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Thank you. Found a great video linked on that website if anyone else is curious. Seems like the perfect size for the spot I have picked.

Here are my Montmorency twin trees this spring. They were bought and planted at same time, side by side, in 2012, and are semi dwarf but seems small for their age. That being said, they produce really well most years, though last year for reasons I can’t figure out the cherries were much smaller. Here they are:

I also have a Northstar that will be fruiting the first time this year (well, it bloomed a lot) and can get photos easily later.
Actually, you can see it in the second photo above. It is the small blooming tree on the back, left.

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The trees arrived!

Gerardi will be on the south side of the house. Hopefully it can take Texas heat. It’s a tiny whip.

The Montmorency will be growing against the North fence line. Tiny, but I like the branching.

The North Star had some monster roots. I wish I would have snagged a picture. I’m not fully set on where I want the North Star, so for now it will be potted. It looks like it gets pretty large after many years.

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@chadspur “Found a great video…”
Yes it is a great video…from our very own strudeldog (Phil Seibel).

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Hey Mark…this probably isn’t the best place to do this, but I just wanted to tell you that I have just been perusing your mulberry web site for the first time and it is INCREDIBLE. I love everything about it. Simple enough that beginners like me can understand it, but also detailed and thorough enough that more advanced mulberry folks can learn from it as well. Very nicely done, my friend. BTW…it also provided me the final proof that my so called black mulberry I bought 5 years ago…isn’t! oh well. Like your said on your site, I’m not the first.

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Thanks @thecityman for the much appreciated compliments. Like you, my first mulberry wasn’t the ‘Persian’ I was expecting. The good thing about mulberries is that they fruit early in its life and one is able to test for themselves whether it is of the quality they were expecting (It took me 6 years before I was positive the ‘Hood’ pear I purchased… wasn’t).

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While I have you, and if the OP won’t mind, I have a question. The tree I bought from Willis Orchards as a Black beauty clearly wasn’t, but I’m a bit confused about it beyond that. It is now 6 years old, probably 18 feet tall and pretty bushy. But what is unusual (to me) is that every year the fruit it produces are just tiny…maybe as few as just 6-9 drupes (that may be the wrong word-the little round things that make up the whole fruit). It has never produced a berry that is larger than about 1/4 inch. There is a wild mulberry near my house which produces fruit 10 times larger than mine. Also, the fruit on mine never get dark purple/black like the wild one. Mine stay mostly red to light purple.

Any idea what I have or does that fruit decription tell you anything else about my tree? Thanks

Very interesting…The only mulberry I know of that has fruit that small is the Texas Mulberry (Morus microphylla), but it has correspondingly small leaves. If you could post a picture of the branches with leaves it may offer up some clues to me. At least the ‘Persian’ I received from Willis (it was a ‘Russian Mulberry’) had decent sized bland fruit on a tree that was mostly male. I finally cut it down last year and grafted a couple Gerardi scions to its stump. What I can’t figure out about Willis is why they chose such an incredibly poor selection of mulberries to call ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Persian’ when there are so many decent choices out there to propagate. They joined the Better Business Bureau a couple years ago so I challenged them on the supposed ‘Persian’ and got them to send the real deal. Maybe you should do the same.

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Can you give me your website. I would like to visit. Thanks.

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Bonus points? Okay…

Geraldi dwarf mulberry from @BobVance saddle-grafted last year onto a wild seedling in my backyard… just putting on fruit and leaves now:

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That websites great! Hopefully others can find it as well. It’s how I found the varieties I wanted(Pakistan white and black, Gerardi).

I decided to put the North Star in the ground and relocate a Tea Olive ( Osmanthus fragrans) to a pot. It’s now living next to a pear tree and the persimmon.

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Thanks great site

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