So many of my cherries look fried. What’s going on?
They look normal to me; it looks like poor pollination of the blossoms. I have the same problem practically every year lately, since honeybees seem to have disappeared from our neighborhood.
I agree with vitog. My Montmorency had that problem as well this past spring. The cherries that were pollinated, however, are now ripening and excellent.
I agree that’s probably what is going on with them. The only thing that I don’t get though is why do I have a gazillion cots and I saw the bees working on them?
Same.
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So do the bees get exhausted and just die after pollenating all the cots?
What variety is your cherry tree? If it is a sweet cherry, Do you have another sweet cherry tree?
3 multigrafted trees
If they are sweet cherries, several are not compatible pollination partners. Even the self fertile does not set well without a compatible partner.
Sweet cherries. I get that, but it’s never been an issue in the decade or longer I’ve had them.
My cherries had a similar problem this year, worse than usual. I attribute that to the weather, which was colder than usual during early spring and then suddenly became much warmer. This had the effect of compressing the blooming time of all of my fruit trees, so that most of them were blooming at the same time. This created an abundance of blossoms that exceeded the capacity of the available pollenators. As mentioned earlier, there were practically no honeybees; and the 200 or so mason bees that I released were not enough to pollinate all of the blossoms. They seemed to be selective, because my prune plums, apples, and pears have excessive developing fruits, but all 4 of my cherry trees have very few.
I know that cots bloom earlier than cherries, rsivulka, but is it possible that there was some overlap of blooming times?
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I know I’m like the 10th person to say the same thing, but I can’t help myself. I am pretty sure that all those dried/dead cherries just didn’t get pollinated. Seeing that one healthy green one in the photo sort of confirms this for me - if it were a freeze or spray drift or almost anything else, it would be unlikely (not impossible) to have a few healthy cherries smack in the middle of others that were killed. But having only the few be visited by a pollinator seems likely. I feel this even more knowing its sweet cherries. Every year after petal drop and for 10-12 days, I am convinced that I am going to have a world-record sweet cherry crop. That is because even unpollinated ones look good and even continue to grow for up to around 10 days. But right when I’m certain that almost all my cherries are going to develop, many or most of them end up looking like yours. Turns out they weren’t pollinated after all, and that’s what I think happened to yours.
@mamuang is right, btw. Over the years I have had every combination of various sweet cherries you can imagine, and they always seem to be poor pollinators It is VERY hard - at least for me- to match up complimenting pollinating sweet cherries! Obvious commercial orchards have it figured out, but I don’t. Then again, since sweet cherries are pretty rare in my area, maybe my climate and kinds of insects and/or some other factor prevents me from getting good pollination rates. I can tell you that I’ve tried those listed as pollinators for each other and put them 15 feet apart and had it not work most of the time. So I’m just not sure what it is, but me and you both seen to have some pollination problems!..
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I still don’t get why after years of having great crops, all of a sudden I’m not.
Did you have the same heat wave we had in the PNW recently? The heat caused a lot of fruit drop across our apples, pears and cherries. We had a huge amount of bee activity and perfect pollination weather. Different varieties handled the heat better than others, probably the heaviest set we’ve had on Spitzenberg and Cox both nearly 100% set, but Empires dropped about 95%.
I’m in the SF Bay Area and am having the same issue on both my Stella trees. Tons of cherries but many that look just like yours. We did have a very, very wet year and wet spring - I’m assuming like everybody else it’s a pollination issue. I do still have lots of good cherries that should mature.
We had a normal warm up, but nothing like the record breaking highs last year.