Hello, I have a small orchard in Seattle and I have a few sunny spots left that I hope to fill up with cherries, ideally something dwarfing. I love cherries but have mixed feelings about commercially available ones, don’t know, maybe my taste is just weird
Bing cherry is too bland and one note, rainier is watery and tastes sour to me (no idea why). The tastiest cherries I’ve had were always some random trees growing in the country that I didn’t know the name of. Out of the cherries I knew the name of, I really liked eating Montmorency (didn’t plant it because it’s so easy to buy in the store) and something called early rainier and maybe early robin if I remember correctly.
After a lot of research I planted CJ this spring but didn’t get a chance to try it yet. What other cherries would you recommend?
Montmorency is a tart cherry while Bing and Rainer are sweet cherry. There is a myriad of romance series cherry bushes (I think 5 or 6 at this point) if you are interested in a tart cherry with dwarfing. Most are also strong growers in my experience. Plus since they are bushes they are easy to propagate if you want more. Juliet is supposed to be the sweetest. I have heard it is hard to get a sweet cherry that tastes better than store bought. There is 2 fruit I hear commercial growers have basically mastered taste wise and those are cherry and watermelon.
I’ve grown Bing cherries that would knock your socks off. Very sweet and flavor as good as it gets in fruit. Are those easy to grow, no. But it can be done. As with most fruit getting the water right improves quality. Too much water generally makes less sweet fruit.
I like Bing better than Rainier. There are better sweet cherries than Bing but not by much IME.
Store bought sweet cherries are picked about two weeks too early so that they can be shipped.
I’m currently growing Royal Crimson, Bing, Van, Utah Giant, and Black Tartarian.
I started with cherries like Bing and Utah Giant. The issue is some sweet cherry are on the north side of the house and 1 cherry is on the south side of the house. There is an incline in between the 2. By the time one leafs out or flowers the other has already flowered. My backyard everything is very much dormant still. My front most things have been leafed out for a month or more. For that reason I would rather have gotten one sweet cherry like Stella if I got a sweet cherry.
@fruitnut just our of curiosity - which cherries did you find to be better than Bing? Since Bing is such a common cherry, I’ll try to find where I can sample it off the tree this season but still curious to explore less common varieties, just because Bing is so easily available in stores (but that calculation of course changes if it will taste much better off the tree).
@Robert How does Black Tartarian produce for you? I’ve been looking at that variety but read reports on this forum that it’s not very productive. It’s also the worry I have about cherries like Danube which sounds good on paper but everything I read says that it grown a small handful of cherries.
Ebony Pearl, Burgundy Pearl, Radiance Pearl, Sandra Rose, Brooks, Coral, Garnet, and Index were all superior varieties that we were able to taste at Andy’s Orchard last year.
I ended up buying Ebony Pearl and Burgundy Pearl trees, along with Benton as a result.
