How many years does a cherry tree generally need to be planted before it bears fruit?
How many years does a cherry tree need to be planted before it bears fruit? There is a saying that “cherries are delicious but the tree is hard to plant”; in fact, it is not the tree that is hard to plant, but rather the fruit that is hard to pick. The cherry tree is quite adaptable and can grow in almost any kind of soil. So, for first-time growers, how many years until a cherry tree bears fruit? And what is cherry tree management like?
How many years until a cherry tree bears fruit?
For large cherries, it is generally three years from planting to the first fruit; if grafting is used, this cycle is greatly shortened, depending specifically on the choice of rootstock.
Points to note when planting cherry trees
1. Trial planting before expansion
Large cherries like warmth and tolerate neither cold, drought, waterlogging, nor strong wind, and are suitable for cultivation in areas with an annual average temperature of 10°C~15°C. Practice has proven that when the annual average temperature is above 15°C, large cherries often bloom abundantly but set little fruit. To introduce and develop large cherries, one must not only consider local factors such as annual average temperature, rainfall, sunshine and frost-free period, but also carefully analyze the local microclimate characteristics: trial planting first, then expansion.
2. Develop firm-fleshed, storage- and transport-tolerant varieties
At present, there are only a dozen or so excellent large cherry varieties verified through cultivation, and each variety has certain shortcomings. For example, Hongdeng, bred in our country, has large fruit, bright color, juicy sweet flesh, and high and stable yields, but it enters full bearing late, and its fruit has thin skin and soft flesh, making it unsuitable for processing, storage and transport, so it is only suitable for small-area planting. In the future, large cherry cultivation should select varieties with attractive appearance, firm flesh, good quality, slight cracking, tolerance to storage and transport, and suitability for both fresh eating and processing.
3. Focus on preventing crown gall disease and viral diseases
Choosing excellent rootstocks suited to local cultivation is the key to successful large cherry cultivation. The most important thing is to see whether the rootstock is resistant to crown gall disease and whether it has viral diseases. In old large cherry production areas, large cherries must absolutely not be developed on continuous cropping land, and large cherry seedlings must certainly not be raised on continuous cropping land; in newly developed large cherry production areas, on the premise of identifying good varieties and good rootstocks, the barrier of crown gall disease and viral diseases must be strictly controlled.
4. Both pollination and fruit thinning are needed
Most large cherry varieties are self-unfruitful or have a very low fruit-setting rate, and require cross-pollination. Some large cherry orchards that fail to produce good yields year after year and bear little fruit at the appropriate age are not affected by freezing damage; the main reason is unreasonable arrangement of pollinizer trees, non-overlapping bloom periods and poor pollination. Xianfeng, Lapins and others are all very ideal pollinizer varieties. Also, weak fruiting branches should be thinned in good time, smaller flowers removed, and small fruits with irregular shape or improper position and deformed fruits thinned out, with 2~3 fruits best retained on each vigorous fruiting branch.