FRUIT OR BLOSSOM? GREAT CHERRY CHOICE

By Richard Wright - Friday, May 2, 2008

Godshill farmer Stuart Pierce has taken on an orchard with 4,000 cherry trees. Picture by Jennifer Burton

GARDENING
PIG farmer Stuart Pierce hopes he has cherry picked a new venture that will bear fruit.
IW Bacon continues without him but down at Godshill he has taken on the 4,000 cherry tree orchard that is in full blossom, at the same time as the ornamentals throughout the Island that bloom in ever-greater spring profusion.
There’s no better spring ornamental than a flowering cherry but with a fruiter it is possible for a gardener to nearly have it all.
Fruiting cherries have nice enough flowers but the colour and mass of bloom does not match their decorative sisters.
Of course what is taken away with one hand is giveth by the other and the fruit more than makes up for transitory beauty.
Stuart’s orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment and soon that will give way to the flash of sweet-tasting fruit.
I couldn’t resist another cherry tree too and, as you do, bought an out-of-date supermarket poly-bagged maiden for just £6.99, the sort of price that makes specialist fruit producer’s pips really squeak.
Unfortunately, the white heart, which hails from Buckinghamshire and has a delightful red-on-yellow colour and sweet taste, is self sterile and I could not for the life of me remember the name of the cherry I already have.
Reluctant to put it into the allotment, only to turf it out again next year, there’s a ready trick that can be used.
White heart currently rests in a pot and I’ll see whether it flowers at the same time as the self-fertile resident.
If they both bloom at the same time there is a fair chance they’ll make beautiful babies.
Down at Godshill, the operation is a bit bigger. Stuart has 4,000 trees of five varieties, similar to mine only by the fact that they are on dwarf stock, the best of which for the compact garden is Gisele.
He is learning his new craft from agronomist Bill Smith who knows the orchard well, and last year with the help of a small army of Polish pruners put the trees back into some semblance of shape.
Size is all-important on a commercial scale, both for spraying and for picking.
Gone are the days when brave men would scramble up special ladders in the orchards of Kent to pick from the high boughs.
This season Stuart will again import specialist labour from Poland, to delicately pick the waves of cherries as the five varieties mature.
No problem with cross-pollination, either, with the help of Mary Case’s bees buzzing between Sasha, Merton Glory, Mermat Merchant, Early Rivers and Hertford, each tree with the potential to produce 10lb of fruit.
In the real world it’s a bit different from that, even with the bird netting stretched over each tree in summer.
At the minute, Stuart is hopeful he can sell all his fruit on the Island, but has the contingency — should there be glut — of a Covent Garden deal and he’s hoping to find someone interested in making cherry jam.
If anyone wants to contact me on that, I can pass on details.
Gardeners and cherry producers will tell you the fruit is prone to split if dry. Wet and split fruit doesn’t cut it in the dessert market, so preserve is a useful back-up.
Over in cherry jam country in Poland’s Prozani, cherry picking’s a bit different.
All the one variety trees are designed to come on stream all at once for the jamming factory and from there make their way via Lidl to my porridge plate.
• One for the future may well be Crown Morello. We all know and love morello chocolates, don’t we? This one, apparently, is superb for pies and preserves — and it thrives on a north-facing wall because it likes shade and resists frost.
How brilliant is that?

BETTY'S OWL IS SCOURGE OF PIGEONS
BETTY Groves’s gardening suggestions took the biscuit and the Let’s Grow Veg prize in my little competition the other week.
She had a serious suggestion for pigeon control and a light-hearted one that I liked even more.
Betty, from Newport Road, Cowes, said: “Place a large plastic owl in the centre of the garden. This will deter the pigeons and crows from coming in and stripping your garden of the greens and fruit.”
That would certainly please brassica lovers who are fed up with building large, awkward cages to keep out the rats on the wing.
Linda, down at Sandlands, removed the net from her cabbages and purple sprouting one day. The next they were stripped bare.
I’ve seen great fat pigeons you would think had a diet of beer and chips bouncing on the netting like a trampoline until they can sneak their greedy beaks in through the saggy net to sneak some more grub.
That leads me on to Betty’s second tip.
She says: “As I know all gardeners have a sense of humour, I couldn’t resist the following suggestion for pigeon control:
“Put out a slug trap of beer. When the slugs are sozzled and drowned, spread them out on the lawn for the pigeons to feast upon.
"When the pigeons are too drunk to fly, let the cat out...”
Now I know gardeners who are pretty fed up with next-door mog’s garden toilet arrangements. What happens when the cat’s too drunk to walk?
Let the dog out?

FRUIT OR BLOSSOM? GREAT CHERRY CHOICE

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