Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

nafex - Re: [NAFEX] short life in sweet cherries

nafex@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Kieran and/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>
  • To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] short life in sweet cherries
  • Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 16:19:32 -0500

According to my book, the nurseries were mostly using mahaleb for cherries at the time (the 70's I think) and even the commercial orchards were experiencing something like 40% mortality on Mahaleb by about 10 years old.  Both with fruit trees and vegetable seeds, the trend is to sell the backyard growers the same stock as the commercial people are planting.  It's cheaper to produce these things in huge quantities, and so they can offer them cheaper.  Unfortunately this can mean that the backyard grower is poorly served.  Tough beans ready all at once for machine picking and canning are really not very nice for eating fresh.  And leftover cherry trees intended for the commercial orchards of Michigan but sold in clayey areas are simply a ripoff. 
    The weird part about this subject is that although I think of sour cherries as much more successful here than sweet cherries, nearly all the producing trees I have met had come from someone's grandma.  So, the nursery practice of putting tart cherries on mahaleb is also killing sour cherries.  Are there Nafex nurseries that are using rootstocks for cherries that are well suited for clay soils?  It never really dawned on me that I ought to be telling local people to avoid buying sour cherries from standard nurseries.  Donna



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page