Best Strength

The sour or cooking cherries have to be dealt with separately as their culture is quite different from the sweet cherries. I find that they prefer to grow on the mulched system rather than in grass. They can therefore be surrounded by straw a foot deep or by sedge peat an inch deep. They bear their fruits largely on young whippy wood and they do well on a north, shady wall. In fact, the Morello cherry is the fruit for a north wall.

Morello cherries are usually budded, though there is a variety in Kent known as the Wye Morello that grows well on its own roots.

The cooking cherries can be fed more than the sweet cherries because they must be encouraged to produce new wood. If they are mulched with straw a foot deep, a fish fertilizer may be given at 3 oz. to the sq. yard, in February and again in August. The mulch is undoubtedly the most important thing because the fruit cannot swell properly unless the fruits can get all the moisture they need. Where mulching is not carried out watering has to be done regularly during hot summers, in June and July.

Morellos can be planted as bush trees, 18 feet apart, but they are very popular as fan-trained trees on north walls, at 15 feet apart. Time to plant is November, while the soil is still warm. Buy two-year-old bush trees or three-year-old fan- trained trees.

Pruning is indeed a very difficult job because, as has already been said, the fruit is borne on the length of thin young wood which grew during the previous season. On a fan-trained tree, therefore, one has to be constantly cutting away the older wood and tying in the new wood. With bush trees, it is advisable to cut back some of the older branches each season the moment the leaves have fallen, and then, if there are any young growths in the centre of the bush, these will have to be cut back in February, the pruning cut being made just above a pointed single shoot bud. It is the double buds that are the fruit buds.

If one is to succeed with sour cherry pruning, it does mean that the pruning must be fairly ruthless after the first six years. After ten years there is usually a fair amount of dead wood to cut out owing to the Brown Rot Disease. It is better not to grass down sour cherries but to grow them on cultivated land which is properly mulched, so that the roots need not be disturbed by cultivation.

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