Cherry

A sweet cherry tree in full fruit is one of the most beautiful sights in a home orchard, and one of the most heartbreaking. The fruit ripens over the course of about ten days, and in that narrow window you are competing with every robin, starling, and jay within a quarter mile. Unless you net the entire canopy — a project that requires scaffolding, patience, and a windless morning — the birds will take ninety percent of the crop before you pick a single bowl. This is not an exaggeration. It is the central fact of growing sweet cherries at home.

Sour cherries, by contrast, are a different negotiation. Montmorency and other pie cherries are self-fertile, so you need only one tree. They tend to stay smaller and are far more tolerant of the fungal diseases that plague sweet varieties in wet springs. The fruit is too tart for most birds to bother with until it is fully ripe, which gives you a longer harvest window. If your goal is a reliable crop with less infrastructure, a sour cherry is often the wiser choice.

Sweet cherries, when you do grow them, need a pollination partner. Most varieties are not self-fertile, and even the ones labeled self-fertile tend to set heavier crops with a second tree nearby. Stella and Lapins are among the few that can fruit alone, but even they benefit from cross-pollination. Check the pollination group before you buy — two trees that bloom at different times will not help each other.

The other serious threat is brown rot, a fungal disease that turns ripening fruit into shriveled mummies on the branch. It thrives in wet springs, and once it takes hold in a tree it is difficult to stop without fungicides. Pruning for good airflow and removing all infected fruit — both on the tree and any that fell to the ground — can slow it, but wet years tend to be losing years. Some growers in damp climates find that sour cherries, which are more resistant, save them the annual fungicide battle.

Cherries are intolerant of waterlogged soil. A tree planted in heavy clay or a low spot where water pools after rain may grow well for a year or two, then suddenly decline as root rot takes hold. The leaves yellow, growth slows, and the tree may die over the course of a single season. If your soil drains poorly, plant on a mound or choose a different site — cherries will not adapt.

The first real harvest typically arrives in the third or fourth year. The tree may set a few fruit earlier, but production stays light until the canopy fills in. Once it does, a mature cherry can produce more fruit than a household can process — if you can get to it before the birds do. For most home growers, that means netting, and netting means committing to the logistics of draping a twenty-foot tree every June for the rest of its productive life.