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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] Evans Cherry, grafting, ripening, harvesting

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  • From: "Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>
  • To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Evans Cherry, grafting, ripening, harvesting
  • Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2007 09:29:42 -0500

Re Evans being soft and juicy when ripe: The reason you don't see fresh sour cherries for sale in the grocery is that they are too soft to ship well. The Duke cherries were crosses of sweet and sour cherries that were sweeter than the sours but bloomed later, and judging from my one speciman, are resistant to whatever leaf/twig ailment that plagues sour cherries here. Alas, mine grows straight up like the pure sweet cherries. These crosses were very popular till refrigerated shipping made it possible to get real sweet cherries from ideal cherry regions. The Duke cherries were also soft like sweet cherries, so they couldn't compete. I'm curious now if you all could make a cross of the Evans to a hardy sweet, (someone listed two tested in Canada) and produce some Duke cherries that could be grown further north than any of the sweet cherries can. You folks up north have a compressed bloom time that would probably allow such crosses. My sweet cherries down here are all completely done blooming for a week or two before the sour cherries start in. I failed to account for this in my plantings, my sour cherries are a good 500-600 ft from the Duke, with a large garden and rampant bamboo grove in between. I have a young sprout from the Duke plnted fairly near to the Evans though.
Regarding these thickets of sprouts Del and Lucky have talked about, they are tempting to graft on, but I'd think you could collect all the cherry or plum viruses known to man in those thickets. Yes, you could test on them, but if something did poorly, would you blame it on the variety or on all the viruses? And you wouldn't dare offer stock to anyone else.
Tell me, am I being paranoid here? Are there that many viruses to worry about? (From some of the books I read, the answer is yes.) Would they spread naturally if brought into the orchard anyway? These are things I think about very seriously. I have some heirloom onions and a kale variety that is commercially extinct. I am careful to throw all scraps of storebought brassicas and onions out under my fruit trees, making sure they never wind up in the garden. I know there are all kind of onion diseases and I know that clubroot made it into the prime cabbage growing areas of the carolinas some years ago. Donna




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