Cherry Trees Blooming. 4.17.19

Sweet Cherries Vandalay and Sweetheart.  4.17.19

Pie Cherry Montmorency.  4.17.19

This is peak bloom time for sweet cherry varieties Vandalay, Sweetheart, and Ranier, as well as for Montmorency.  I don't think Montmorency pollinates the sweet cherries, and is self pollinating.  The sweet cherries look like they will have a good crop this year.

I planted Vandalay and Sweetheart from shipped bare root trees from Raintree in 2012.  Ranier was a bare root tree from BiMart in about 2014.   Montmorency was from Home Depot, I think in 2010, and I replanted it to the Battleground orchard in 2012.  It was a ball and burlap tree.

Sweet Cherry Ranier.  First Bloom.  4.1719

Fruit Tree from BiMart for $12.88. 1.28.15

Ranier Cherry Tree, Bare Root.  1.28.16

 This was a surprise.  I went to BiMart to buy a pocket knife for grafting.  There were bare-root trees in front of the store, all marked at $12.88.  The varieties were standards, nothing cutting edge or exotic, and very limited selection.  For that price, what can you ask?  I have been wanting to add a Ranier Cherry to the Battleground orchard, by grafting another tree from the one in Vancouver.  Which is way, way to big to think about moving.  At this price, I can start over with a new tree.  Cherries grow fairly fast, and this will likely produce as soon as the tree I was trying to top work and now has some sort of fungal issue.

Roots of Ranier Cherry Tree.  1.28.15

The roots are as good as a lot of mail-order trees that go for $20 or $30 or more, and s good as a lot of container trees that are just bare-root or balled-and-burlapped trees that are stuck into some compost and sold as garden-ready.