Cherry Picking Time

I haven’t been doing much with our ‘North Star’ pie cherry tree the past few years, other than pruning it.  I felt it wasn’t producing enough cherries to warrant the effort.  With the uncertainty and shortages that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic, I thought we should get as much from our garden as we can this year.  Homegrown cherries also seem to taste better.

We covered the tree with bird netting a couple weeks ago.  This takes some effort as the tree is taller than I am and it takes four pieces of netting to cover it completely.  I use poles to support the netting so it doesn’t pull the branches down, clips to hold the pieces of netting together, and pegs to secure the netting to the ground.  You can see what the bird netting looks like in my posts Bird Netting and Bird Netting Part 2.  Without the netting, birds will eat all the cherries.

Yesterday (June 19th) we picked the cherries.  After separating out the bad fruit and removing the pits, we had about 500 g (a little more than a pound) of cherries.  This should be enough to produce one pie.

That’s a far cry from the harvests we had many years ago.  Some fruit may be lost to disease as I no longer use any sprays.  It’s also possible there’s a lack of pollination, but I did see several bees in the cherry flowers this spring.  I also saw a bird destroying cherry flowers in the past, which decimated that year’s harvest, although we didn’t get a lot of cherries the previous year either.