Cherries are Splitting!

June 16, 2011 by

I know we desperately needed the rain, and the garden is looking much better for it.  I spent a good 3 hours planting beans and weeding at the weekend, and it was an absolute joy.  The soil was so easy to dig, and the weeds came up really easily, roots and all.  But it is not good for our cherries!

Split Cherry

The rain has come at exactly the wrong moment.  Lots of our beautiful cherries were just beginning to ripen, and now their skins have split, and the ants are having a feast!  We’ve picked and eaten a few but most just aren’t ripe enough yet.  It’s one of those things that we read about, but didn’t act upon.  But, you REALLY DO have to protect your ripening cherries from the rain.  Once the cherries are fully grown the skins stop growing, but water can still be absorbed through the skin, which causes the flesh to swell and the skins to split.  Now I wish we’d “potato bagged” our cherries.  Next year we will definitely be erecting a waterproof cover over our cherry trees (somehow!).  We probably need to do it this year, as we’ve still got a reasonable number that haven’t split yet and the rain just keeps coming!  We’ve only got a couple of trees so we should be able to sort something out, but it must be a nightmare for the commercial growers.  Surely they can’t protect all their fruit from the rain.

 


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Stella Cherry Tree Blossoms

April 9, 2011 by

Only a few days from when I took the last photographs, our two cherry trees (Stella) have blossomed.  They look lovely….though I have to admit that I’m seeing slightly passed the flower beauty and starting to count the cherries!  If each of these flowers do turn into a cherry (rather than dropping off), then we’re in for a real treat!  We’ve got them in a fruit cage, which is essential…I can say from personal experience that if you don’t protect them from birds you won’t get a single one!  Blackbirds in particular are very very partial to cherries and have no objection to eating them when they are white, so you simply don’t get a look in.

Note the stake to the left of the image – young trees need staking to prevent wind from rocking them – easy to do with a bare rooted tree as you can drive the stack in before positioning the tree.

If you’re interested in growing cherry trees, then here’s a list of cherry tree suppliers


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Cherry Tree Bursting Into Life

April 5, 2011 by

We’re looking forward to the cherries this year.  We planted two bare rooted  Stella cherry trees last year.  They’re on Gisela 5 rootstock, which should reduce their eventual size to around 3 meters high (or less with pruning), making them ideal for growing in cages.  We picked the flowers off last year to allow all the energy to go into root production rather than fruit production, so this will be our first year of fruit.  The growth looks wonderful.  We’ll be keeping an eye on the weather forecasts from now on as frost would damage the blossom and hence the crop. Any hint of a frost forecast and the trees will be covered in fleece.   Growing cherries  is not low maintenance but with the price of cherries in the shops (yikes!), is worth it.


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