Four Key Points for Sweet Cherry Cultivation
Trial planting before expansion. Sweet cherries prefer warmth and tolerate neither cold, drought, waterlogging, nor strong winds. They are suited to regions with an annual average temperature of 10°C to 15°C. Practice has shown that when the annual average temperature is above 15°C, sweet cherries often produce many flowers but set few fruits. When introducing and developing sweet cherries, one should not only consider the local annual average temperature, ...
Trial planting before expansion
Sweet cherries prefer warmth and tolerate neither cold, drought, waterlogging, nor strong winds. They are suited to regions with an annual average temperature of 10°C to 15°C. Practice has shown that when the annual average temperature is above 15°C, sweet cherries often produce many flowers but set few fruits. When introducing and developing sweet cherries, one should not only consider factors such as the local annual average temperature, precipitation, sunshine and frost-free period, but also carefully analyze the local microclimate characteristics: first conduct trial planting, then expand.
Develop firm-fleshed varieties that store and transport well
At present, there are only a dozen or so excellent sweet cherry varieties that have been verified through cultivation, and each variety has certain shortcomings. For example, Hongdeng, bred in China itself, has large fruits, bright color, juicy and 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, and suitable only for small-scale planting. In the future, sweet cherry cultivation should select varieties that are attractive in appearance, firm-fleshed, good in quality, lightly cracked, tolerant of storage and transport, and suitable for both fresh eating and processing.
Focus on preventing crown gall and viral diseases
Selecting excellent rootstocks suited to local cultivation is the key to successful sweet cherry cultivation. The most important thing is to see whether the rootstock is resistant to crown gall and whether it carries viral diseases. In old sweet cherry production areas, when developing sweet cherries, one must never use continuous-cropping land, let alone use continuous-cropping land to raise sweet cherry seedlings; in newly developed sweet cherry production areas, on the premise of identifying good varieties and good rootstocks, the barriers of crown gall and viral diseases must be strictly controlled.
Both pollination and fruit thinning are needed
Most sweet cherry varieties are self-unfruitful or have very low fruit set and require cross-pollination. Some sweet cherry orchards that fail to yield well year after year, or that are of bearing age but bear few fruits, are not affected by freezing injury; 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 a timely manner, smaller flowers removed, and small fruits with irregular shape or improper position and deformed fruits thinned out; each vigorous fruiting branch should preferably retain 2 to 3 fruits.