North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Charles Paradise <machelp@attglobal.net>]

Richard,
I would spare you trying sweet cherry on wild black cherry.
wild black cherry could be Prunus Serotina, the cherry furniture in 
Pennsylvania is made from,
perhaps we should call it the Wild Furniture Cherry and be more certain which 
cherry we are
referring to?  Or perhaps you might be referring to Prunus Virginiana, a more 
bushy form.   In
either case, I believe you will encounter severe incompatibilities even 
though all these
cherries appear to share the same 16 chromosomal count.   Consider, for 
example that your
european cherries bear their fruit in clusters directly off the stem, but the 
Prunuses Serotina
and Virginiana bear their cherries on racemes.   This makes the Sweet and 
Sour european cherries
and the Prunuses Serotina and Virginiana about as different from each other 
as say, crab and
lobster are from each other. Of course if it sounds like I detected these 
cherry-differences
early on and reasoned out their graft incompatibilities, think again, because 
in my try-anything
approach I grafted lots of sweet and sour cherries onto Prunus Serotina, got 
takes that over the
course of 12 months barely survived and finally languished.  In my case the 
thought usually
follows the experience, rather than the other way around.

What you might have compatibility with is grafting sour or sweet european 
cherries onto the
american species Prunus Pennsylvanica, which bears cherries in clusters off 
the stem same as the
european cherries do.  The growing and underground spreading habit of the 
Prunus Pennsylvanica
might not be too promising for this work, though, and I have not tried 
grafting anything onto
Prunus Pennsylvanica.  I think I got tired before I got to trying that 
combination.

Found a seedling Mulberry down the street and some are ripe this 
morning...absolutely delicious,
best ungrafted Mulberry I've tasted.
Charlie Paradise
zone 5 / Massachusetts / looking forward to NAFEX let's have dinner on August 
21 who will join
me?

rmelrose@bluemoo.net wrote:

> I would be very interested to hear how you get on with the sweets cherries
> grafted onto hardy sour cherries, since I was planning on trying such
> things myself. I will definitely have a go grafting onto some wild Black
> Cherry (although it all seems to have something that looks like black
> knot).