March 25 2016 - ‘Rainier’ Cherry tree blooms!This is pretty exciting. Our cherry t
March 25 2016 - ‘Rainier’ Cherry tree blooms!This is pretty exciting. Our cherry trees have never bloomed… not entirely certain why. The ‘Rainier’ in particular is pretty disease prone and I was concerned that I might have brought a typhoid mary into the orchard, something that easily gets diseases and then due to proximity and such, could pass them along to other nearby trees. We bought the cherry trees when we bought the original ‘Redhaven’ Peach tree; while that peach tree has done wonderfully these Cherries have been meh at best. A bloom is a great sign. In 2015 our ‘Bing’ was also quite sick with fungal issues - it’s had one heck of a leaking sore - and currently also has a single bloom.V adores cherries, so most of the trees are really for him (’Montmorency’ ‘Stella’, ‘Bing’). I do love Rainier cherries though, maybe one day we’ll get some fruit from these things yet. It is on full dwarfing root stock, before we knew better. Dwarfing root stocks just starve scions for nutrients; you can entirely control a tree’s shape by pruning. Live and learn. We get everything on standard root stock now, if possible.We did a lot of planning when picking fruit trees, we tried to select late bloomers since we’re in a frost pocket - that means we’re more likely to get frosts, and later in the spring/earlier in the fall, too. The weather has been so warm though, it shows the limits of what even careful planning can do. It’s March, but our frost date is in May! -- source link
#crittercove#orchard#food forest#cherry trees#frost pocket