Feed the Birds

...and the raccoons and the dogs... Cherries are ripe in the orchard and are in great demand amongst visitors and residents, both invited and not.  Cherries are my favorite fruit so I have, over the past six years, planted five trees.  The first two I planted, a Black Tartarian and a Ranier, are old enough to bear a nice amount of fruit.  Unfortunately, they both got sick a couple years ago with canker so I’ve been pruning out infected limbs each year.  The black tartarian was drastically cut back to the trunk — all limbs gone — but it has rebounded.  A couple of the new limbs had a couple of cherries.  The critters got to them first which is a bummer.  Black tartarian cherries are dark red, almost black, with a great flavor similar to Bing.  They also act as a pollinators for most other sweet cherry varieties.

On the Ranier, I cut off most of the limbs two years ago but left one that was only slightly infected.  The new limbs on that tree are covered in big, juicy, sweet cherries.  The diseased limbs have small leaves and small, sour cherries.  There are a lot of cherries on this tree; enough for all of us to share.  I’m hoping the birds and raccoons will eat the small, sour ones and leave me the big, sweet ones.

A third cherry tree had its first, small crop this year.  It is a Utah Giant which has cherries which look and taste similar to Ranier but are larger (hence the name) and I think have a nicer, more complex flavor than the Ranier.  My last two cherry trees are just a few years old so no cherries yet.

The cherries are particularly loved by Bullock’s orioles but I see other birds snacking in there as well.  I’ve been finding random cherries on the ground in the pasture so I’m not sure if birds are dropping them or other critters are doing so.  Yesterday, the bird bath was full of cherry pits.

I cleaned out the bird bath before taking this photo.  It was disgusting.

I thought, what the heck?  Then I remembered that raccoons like to wash their food and figured that explained the pits and the toppled plants near the bird bath.  Sure enough, later I found raccoon scat under a pear tree — and it was full of cherry pits.

All the hard work I did earlier this year in the orchard seems to be paying off.  The trees all look healthy (except for the one diseased cherry limb which I will remove once the cherries are gone) and are loaded with fruit.  I didn’t fertilize them at all this year with anything other than a nice layer of composted horse manure under their mulch of wood chips.