By Mr Fluttergrub
As I write, the cherries are blossoming; I don’t have a lot, just two sweet cherries and four sour types. None are large trees, all are grown in ‘restricted’ form, that is, kept to a compact size by training and pruning. The form I use is the fan, the traditional trained style for stone fruit, where branches radiate from a short trunk. This form is so-named as the splay of the branches resembles the pleats on an opened hand-held fan. It’s not the easiest style of trained tree to create or maintain, but it’s one especially suited to cherries which are somewhat unruly in habit and difficult to keep restrained. I should add, if you’re not familiar with the difference, that sweet cherries are those that can be eaten uncooked while the sour types are just that, too tart or ‘sour’ for most palates and so usually only eaten cooked or otherwise processed.
At this point you may be wondering, given sweet cherries can be a sumptuous summer treat consumed straight from the tree, why I’ve twice as many sour types. The reason is simple: sweet cherries are challenging to grow well, whereas sour types are comparatively easy. Free standing, sweet cherries will grow vigorously, making towering trees that are difficult to harvest. While fan training against a wall or fence is perfectly possible, on all but the more recently available dwarfing rootstocks, keeping the trees in check is tricky, requiring careful pruning. Whether grown as a tree or fan, netting is also essential if most of the crop is not to be taken by birds. And, even if birds can be fended off, there are other problems. Sweet cherry blossom is prone to spring frost damage while aphis often stunts and contorts new shoots giving the trees a dishevelled appearance. Then there are various fruit flies, including the recently arrived spotted winged drosophila, that can infest the fruit making for a less than mouthwatering eating experience. Finally, unlike most sour cherries, many types of sweet cherries are not ‘self-fertile’ needing pollen from a tree of a different variety to set a good crop.
Sour cherries aren’t immune to some of these problems but are less challenging to grow and more likely to provide a worthwhile harvest. In particular, with a generally weaker growth habit they’re far easier to prune, protect and pick. In the UK sour cherries are almost synonymous with the variety Morello. All my sour types are of this variety, you rarely see other sour types offered for sale by nurseries. Naturally compact, if grafted on a modern dwarfing cherry compatible rootstock such as Colt, the Morello is easily fan trained. Another plus is that the Morello will grow and fruit well in unfavourable spots. Even on a north facing wall or fence, where few other fruit trees would flourish, it’ll thrive and produce ripe fruit. What’s more, while the cherries may be sour to the taste, they’re appealing to the eye. The fruit turns a glossy and luscious looking deep burgundy, almost black, colour when fully ripe and ready for picking.
All my Morellos are grown as fans, trained to a post and wire framework to keep branches and shoots roughly in place. Growth can be uneven so symmetry is merely an aspiration. Far more important to obtaining fruit is that the support structures are backed by solid fences. This means the ripening cherries can be protected against pilfering birds by simply draping old net curtains over the trees securing these to the wires by clothes pegs. Standard garden netting is an alternative but, in my experience – probably because it makes the ripening cherries more visible – this just incites birds to greater efforts at plunder.
Just as training and protecting sour cherries grown as fans is relatively straightforward, so is the pruning. As with all stone fruit, to reduce disease risk, this should be carried out in summer. There’s lots of advice on pruning fans online, some of it contradictory, but the main consideration is that sour cherries like the Morello fruit on short young shoots produced the previous summer. On my established fan trained trees this means pruning, which I carry out after picking, mainly entails cutting back old shoots that have fruited leaving the younger ones to carry cherries next season.
For some further straightforward advice on growing sour or Morello cherries the Gardeners’ World website is hard to beat (click here for article) This only leaves me to add a few lines about culinary uses. Sour cherries like Morello retain flavour better than sweet types when cooked for desserts and make the best of all cherry jams. They can also be used for savoury purposes or even to make a liqueur (traditionally, kirsch was distilled from sour cherries like the Morello). And, of course, there’s cherry pie or, better still as far as I’m concerned, cherry clafoutis. It’ll be a few more months yet before these treats can be savoured but the Morello blossom is looking good so I’m hopeful of a good crop.
We’re keeping our fingers crossed for Mr Fluttergrub and his cherry crop! We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article. Do you have experience of growing cherries? If so we’d love to hear from you. Your findings could be added to a social media post when we share this article for the benefit of the WWOOF UK community and beyond.
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All photos by Mr Fluttergrub.
