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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
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