"Sacha" wrote ...

Bob Hobden said:

"sacha" wrote ...

Martin said:

snip

After all the articles about how bad things are for farmers because of
climate change, there's a farmer in East Yorkshire expecting to get
his record crop of barley in the Guinness Book of Records as a world
record. Not sure what this has to do with the subject.

And I read today that the cherry crop is terrific. There's a dwarf form
planted in a Kent orchard yielding a terrific crop. The form is
'Gisela'.

Gisela 5 is the most dwarfing rootstock for cherries, all our four are on
that rootstock. Strangely Brogdale didn't want us to have the tree we
ordered from them on that rootstock, they said it was too dwarfing for
the garden and best for container grown trees and I had to persuade them
by saying I can't do ladders. All ours are doing very well, I've had to
prune them quite hard this year to keep them within their cage and we got
a reasonable crop (the second year for 2 and third year for 2). Blackfly
on the new growth was a serious problem this year.

The orchard I read about growing these watch the ripening like hawks and
move cages over the trees at the appropriate time, so the cages must be
quite a size, I'd think. I don't really understand that about it being too
dwarfing for the garden. Do they mean it spreads more than it rises, if you
see what I mean?!

It keeps the trees smaller in every way except the size of the fruit. So it
makes it much easier to pick the crop, the trees can be closer together, and
they are just easier to deal with, prune and spray etc. We have 4 under a 6
metre long cage.
If you see an old sweet cherry tree they are huge, we had one down the road,
unfortunately felled to make way for housing, but it was taller than a two
storey house and roof.
--
Regards. Bob Hobden.
Posted to this Newsgroup from the W of London, UK