I’m looking forward to having fruit next year on this 2nd leaf cherry tree. I have been pruning it using the KGB pruning method. Here is the east side
Close up south side.
Very pretty and symmetrical using this method. A very quick growing 2nd leaf tree too! On Gisela 5.
Nice looking tree! And I think there are a few flower buds in there. Hopefully you’ll get a harvest.
I hope so, it doesn’t get a great amount of light, the house is on the south side and is 2 story, although the sun rises high in the summer, so noon to dusk it has full sun. Some in the morning too. It is young, but should have some fruit. No fruit buds this spring, again though I just planted it the year before. It was a replacement tree from Grandpa’s. The first died from canker at my cottage, so i planted this one in the city. I give up at the cottage. i have one 6 year old tree with canker left there.
I’m also should get fruit off my two Carmine Jewel trees too. I decided to put them in the garage, both in pots, with roots into the ground. Still outside, not bad yet…
@Drew51 - I was wondering about timing of winter pruning. I have cherry’s also and wanted to prune for size control but both have not dropped leaves. Do you think I am good to go or should I wait until Jan/Feb?
Where are you at? Here in Michigan a fungus can get into the trees during winter. I think it is called Silver Leaf. So no pruning after August I do my structural pruning in July and August if possible. It also depends on what rootstock you have. The dwarfing rootstocks tend to make the trees cluster fruit buds at the tip. Too many for the leaves to support. So as late as possible. For me About March 15th or later I will head the tips back about 6 inches. If you have to do structural pruning and you’re in a similar environment to mine, wait till late winter.
Also I spray copper after all pruning, in summer I just spray the pruning cuts with heavy copper not to hurt the foliage.
If you live in an area where fungal diseases are low, it doesn’t matter as much. I would not prune before dormancy anywhere though as pruning stimulates growth, and you want trees to harden off at this time. The last thing you want to do is stimulate growth.
Nice tree Drew! I have 2nd leaf Vandalay and Danube cherries on Gisela 5. They sure look like nice structured trees. Vandalay had a pathetic single cherry fruit this summer. So I look forward to the next season as well. I am planning to graft several more varieties of sweet and sour cherries on the same trees for the diversity and pollination.
Antmary,
I hope you have better luck than me with Vandalay and Danube.
Vandalay is productive but cracks like crazy. It is loaded with fruit every year. After 5-6 years, I still have not eaten any fully ripe cherries from it. It is scheduled to be removed next spring.
Danube is very stingy re. production. After 4-5 years, it had about 20-30 cherries. The cherries tasted good for a sour cherry but the production is so poor. I probably will collect some scionwood before I remove it.
You are in the midwest, your climate may be better than mine.
I have Black Gold and Black Star left. I will try to see if I could convert my 2 yrs old Black Star to a KGB system, a bit late but we’ll see.
Because of the way I prune it, a multi-grafted tree would not work with this method. But hey why not! White Gold is self fertile, makes a great pollinator too.
I would like a dark cherry, I just don’t have room.
Other cherries that might be good are the NY Pearl series of dark cherries. And some of the old cultivars are good too like Stella, and Lapins. Around here a lot of Emperor Francis trees are grown.
Some of the new tart cherries were a disappointment. Except for the Canadian Bush cherries, the Romance series. I have two Carmine Jewels. Others in the series look excellent too.
I really don’t need a lot of tart cherries so I’m good to go with the two CJ plants. I have them in pots for now.
They both should fruit next year.Here is one of them, leaves are gone already! It also rooted in the ground via the drain holes! Yikes!
Thanks for the input Mamuang! This is exactly why I would like to graft more varieties. I think that the Danube issues might be because of the lack of cross pollination. We assume that sour cherries are self pollinating, but some of them are better at that than the others. Also grafting more productive varieties on the same tree never hurts 
I am also planning to put tarp or plastic sheets under the Vandalay to keep it drier during ripening.
My main issue with sweet cherry is OFM. No matter how much I spray or prune it comes back and it LOVES sweet cherry. My neighbor has two peach trees and this year she planted even two more of them. They are infested with OFM and she never ever sprays them. Now I started to catch myself on the bad thoughts that I will be very happy if they die soon 
Are you going to graft more sour or sweet varieties onto it for pollination? My Danube had fruit for the first time this year (3rd year), but there were only 5-6 cherries on quite a good sized tree (far less than a similar sized Northstar). I’ll give it another year or two, but it is occupying a very good location (full sun), so my patience won’t last indefinitely. Maybe I’ll start grafting a bit now and the rest of the tree will get the hint (or the pollination will help).
Antmary,
All my four cherry trees are about 8 ft apart. I do not think it is a pollination issue. Black Gold and Vandalay flowers like crazy. Danube just chaep on me
I do not have OFM problem with cherries. They love my peaches.
If you want scionwood of Black Gold and/or Black Star, please PM me.
You can have scion from my White Gold too, but I do’t prune till March as stated.
Drew, I think your sour cherries may stay as they are. They should be hardy enough to survive in the pots during the winter. They have their roots in the ground so they can get nutritients from the soil and they do not need to be watered as much. I would like to have White Gold scions, thank you.
Mamuang, thank you for your offer. I would like to have some cherry scion wood. I’ll PM to you later in the season, in February or March.
Bob, I decided that I do not want to have many closely spaced trees, but rather a few well developed multigrafted ones. I am thinking to graft sour cherries on sour cherry Danube and sweet cherries on Vandalay. I found out that ARS has quite a lot of Russian or let’s say eastern Europe varieties in the bank but there is a little if any information about them. Some of them are well known back in Russia and are supposed to be good. So I am thinking if I can get hold of the scion wood I can trial them.
Sour cherries that I am thinking are:
Lubskaya - big very good looking productive bright red cherries, but processing type mainly;
Griot Moskovskiy and Shirpotreb Cherniy - all purpose black sour cherries good for eating.
I would probably graft Monmorency too for the comparison.
Antmary and Drew,
Scionwood should be collected when a tree is fully dormant. For me, it is mid Jan- mid feb. Colect scionwood at that time, wrap it with little damp paper towel, put it in a gallon bag, make a note on a bag and keep it in a fridge.
You can mail scionwood like that to others as soon as you collect it.
You can graft them later when leaves start to come out. My area is early April.
When I collected scionwood in March, scionwood started to push growth. My graft did not take. I have no problem with cherry grafting when scionwood was collected at the right time.
Please PM me in early Jan so I can put a list who wants what.
The height of contracting Silver Leaf disease here, can’t do it. I won’t risk the health of my tree. It is the absolute worst time to prune cherry trees here. Of course how or why would you know that? The disease is fatal or can be to cherry trees here.
Last frost here is May 15th, so March the tree will be well dormant and it is a safer time to prune. Two months from last frost, temps may still be in negative numbers here. I prune all my trees in March here.
I think this will depend on local weather and the type of fruit. I haven’t got much experience with grafting cherries, but with easy things like pears the timing doesn’t seem so sensitive. I was very impressed that the Asian pear scionwood I cut in mid-April for someone on the board had 100% takes.
I think Danube may have both sweet and sour cherries in it’s ancestry, so I was thinking about grafting both to it. Maybe I’ll graft some sweets from Mamuang to it, as well as some tarts from my yard (Balaton, Jubileum, Carmine Jewel, etc) to get the best shot at good pollination.
You’ve got me looking as well now. I’m thinking about trying out Shubinka and Dropia (both listed as very high brix, with Shubinka listing 23). Both are listed as small in size through, so I suppose that is the trade-off. I may also give “Pandy 114” a try, as it lists it as the representative variety for the largest-sized fruit category (though intermediate brix).
All the tart cherries seem to be based in Geneva, which has sent me apple scionwood in the past, so I think there is a decent chance of getting some of this wood too.
Here I am trying to paste the links to some of the Russian sour cherries from GRIN database
Griot Moskovskiy enter link description here
Lubskaya enter link description here
Tschernokorka enter link description here
Hope to receive the scions.
Bob I do not know where you found the information about Shubinka’s high brix. I looked into the Russian description of it and it says that it is small and sour with not very good taste. Could you provide the link?
I was getting the data directly from the ARS/GRIN site. I don’t know Russian, so all my data was coming from the ARS site. If you click the “Observations” link at the bottom of this page, you’ll see a “SOLSOLIDS” value of 23.70 (the brix). Now high brix doesn’t mean that it is sweet, as there can be a lot of acid mixed in, as it seems that this one may have from your description. I couldn’t find much with normal searches. I suspect that the spelling may be a bit different.
I clicked into your links and they seem to go to Bing searches for each of the names, not GRIN. But, the links were still very helpful, as they provided the Russian spelling, which brought up a bunch of links. I went through a few and clicked translate. Some of the sites only tell you the positives, but there were a few interesting tidbits from one site in particular. I’ve quoted it below.
Griot Moskovskiy-
Good: “dark-red, suitable for fresh consumption and different types of processing. The taste of sour-sweet, pleasant”.
Bad: “average resistance to fungal diseases”, including “monilia blossom wilt-below average”.
Lubskaya-
Bad (to me): “For fresh fruit consumption Lûbskoj mediocre taste, so it’s sort of a predominantly technical use (compotes, jam, wine), freezing and drying.”
Worse: “Cherry Lûbskaâ is susceptible to disease suspectable-kokkomikozom and brown rot (up to 4 points).”
Tschernokorka (called “Černokorka” on link)-
Good: “The flesh is dark red, juicy. Taste sweet, Nice. Bone is small, well separated from the pulp. Multi-purpose fruit.”
Bad: “susceptibility to leaf sport”.
Yes, I thought that that if you will be interested you’ll translate the links.
Sour cherries are very popular in Russia. There are so many new and very good varieties of them, but unfortunately they are not available in United States.
Those are all older varieties which are less resistant to diseases. But my Vandalay cherry also gets black spot, which is cured with some spraying, so I am willing to try them. Lubskaya is more for the processing, but it supposed to be very productive and it is a good pollinator for the others.
The other less popular cherries that I like are Studencheskaya (it has very good parents), Pamyat Vavilova and Vladimirskaya (this one has so many clones, some are good and some are bad).
For me as far as tart cherries the Romance series is awesome. I really don’t need any others. The idea of 6 foot bushes with no pruning too appeals to me a lot. Plus the brix on some is very high. My only complaint is not all are available from the series here in the USA.
