Cherries taste good but the trees are hard to grow: Changzhou cherries finally see a bumper harvest after 5 years

Cherries taste good but the trees are hard to grow. This is true of Chinese cherries, and the same goes for American sweet cherries. Qiu Jianguo, who is at the Changzhou Hongda Vegetable Professional Cooperative in Xinqiao Town, Xinbei District, likes growing fruits that no one else has. The American sweet cherries old Qiu grows can reach a single-fruit weight of 8 grams, making them truly large cherries.

It took 5 years to finally welcome a bumper harvest of large cherries

In the eyes of professionals, cherry trees are somewhat demanding about their environment: at temperatures of 0 to 7 degrees, a cherry tree must accumulate 1,000 hours of chilling before it will bloom and bear fruit, so it can only be a product of latitudes near a specific range.

Within China, the place universally recognized as suitable for growing large cherries is Shandong, which sits near 35 degrees north latitude, at the same latitude as the United States and about 3 degrees of latitude higher than Changzhou, which lies south of the Yangtze River. To make Changzhou's geography and climate conditions fit the growth habits of cherry trees more closely, the effort and time required can well be imagined. In the words of cooperative head Qiu Jianguo, he spent several years racking his brains, and being able to grow them was truly no easy feat.

Cherry trees native to China bloom in February. However, in early April, when a reporter interviewed at the Hongda Vegetable Professional Cooperative, some cherry trees in the greenhouses had already dropped their blossoms and set fruit, producing green fruits about the size of a baby's finger, while others were in full bloom, with dense clusters of white flowers on their branches, clearly much larger than the flowers of Chinese cherries.

According to Qiu Jianguo, these cherry trees were introduced in 2012 from the School of Agriculture and Biology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Different varieties of cherry trees are interplanted in each greenhouse, including six or seven varieties such as Brooks, Ruby, Napoleon, and Meizao. Regardless of the variety, the flowers they produce are much larger than those of Chinese cherries. The variety with the largest flowers and the longest flower stalks is Hongdeng.

Old Qiu said that growing American sweet cherries is a very risky business. After the cherry trees are planted, one must wait at least three years before they gradually enter the full-production period. Last year was the first year they bore fruit; across several greenhouses there were a total of 20 mu of cherries, adding up to just over a thousand cherry trees, and only this year have they begun to enter the peak fruiting period.

After attending a lecture at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he took the cherry trees home

In Changzhou's vegetable-growing industry, old Qiu, who has grown vegetables for half his life, is considered somewhat well known. In earlier years, he also grew only some common local varieties familiar in Changzhou; the varieties were ordinary, so the returns were only so-so. With the development of high-efficiency protected agriculture in our city, old Qiu began to tinker with some vegetable varieties that were not commonly seen on the market at the time, such as fruit cucumbers, colorful cherry tomatoes, and fruit varieties once rarely seen in Changzhou such as netted melons, Hami melons, and sweet melons, and he also registered the trademark "Xinbei Star" for the cooperative.

In recent years, more and more people in Changzhou have been growing colorful cherry tomatoes and fruit cucumbers, so old Qiu began thinking about trying some varieties that no one else had. Thus, after attending a lecture at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he brought cherry trees back to Changzhou.

For these several dozen mu of cherries, old Qiu and his wife are full of hope, and they have devoted considerable thought and effort to tending them carefully. To help the cherry trees bear better fruit, this year, during the cherry flowering period, in addition to traditional hand pollination and bee pollination, old Qiu also specially bought several boxes of pollinating bumblebees at 400 yuan per box. These bees are large in size and highly efficient at pollination, and the price is not low either: a box has 80 bees, which works out to 5 yuan per bee. The three-pronged approach has indeed worked; the trees that have already set fruit look promising, and the cherries in the greenhouses are expected to ripen in mid-to-late May. By then, old Qiu and his wife will be waiting at Xinqiao for everyone to come pick them.