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The Cherry Trees

We have two cherry trees established in the side yard. We have a cheery tree that offers us an abundance of sour cherries, pie cherries. That little tree can gift us with two or three quarts of ripe fruit each year (with maybe as much again going to the birds when we are not vigilant). The cherries are dark red, fat with staining juice, intense with flavor, and we turn them into sauce we eat with ice cream. We get maybe six cherries from the sweet cherry, if that, and the birds take every one.

This is not too surprising. The sour cherry is self-pollinating; it can produce fruit on its own. The sweet cherry needs another cherry to pollinate it so that it can produce fruit; the idea was to have the sour pollinate the sweet, and to see what would happen. The problem here has been that the two cherries do not flower at the same time, so we went ahead and got another sweet cherry for the side yard, this time hoping that we’d end up with good pollination (this new cherry is purported to be good for that) at the same time, and both sweet cherries would be abundant.

This year, the sour and the old sweet have bloomed together. The new sweet still hasn’t bloomed yet. We will watch, and see what happens, but it is telling to see here in our little side yard that the clocks are off, now.

We will watch, and see what happens.