North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

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