July was a bit of a rough month here at Wicked Raven Farm! I nearly decided to quit being any kind of a farmer at all! The garden at the school was vandalized twice and we lost a good bit of produce, but luckily only a few plants were too damaged to recover, I pulled my collarbone out of joint in June and didn't let it rest so now it aches whenever I do anything at all,and my Wicked Cherries all got gone. I showed you in earlier blog about training strawberries into flats to expand the row (the little garden vandals rode their bikes through the flats and damaged a lot of them), and how I used fencing rounds to protect the cherry trees (read on - it was rough), but here is a way to grow cherries from seed easily over the winter to expand your orchard!
These are Carmine Jewel Cherry seeds - saved for me by my dad, Doug Carney at Snowfire Gardens. They have a few of these cherry trees and they put on a TON of cherries each season and they are so good. Tasty in a pie or right off the bush, and they are cold hardy as well.
I started with a 3" deep flat of good compost mix soil. I found a corner of one of our garden beds that we had already harvested the produce out of for the season and I buried that flat in the soil there to the rim. I had about 25-30 cherry seeds that I planted in there about an inch deep. I did add a couple of decent sized rocks to keep the wind and the pets from tipping the flat.
The above photo lets you see what the whole bed looks like - moose eaten broccoli and all! I didnt even grow broccoli this year, we never get to eat any of it anyway!
Once the seeds are planted and buried in the flat, just leave it until spring and see what pops up! I had 18 plants come up in this flat, and out of those 15 survived to transplant either into pots or into the orchard area. They are currently about a foot tall in the orchard area.
Above photo is one of the Carmen Jewells that came up this spring in the flat of seeds! Awesome!
We will have enough to share with family and with the school to add to the orchard there as well!
This tree is a Bali/Evans cherry tree in the yard that bore fruit for the first time this year since I had used the wire wrap and kept the moose out, but as I said earlier, July was a rough month! I had taken the wire round off of this tree because hubby was having trouble mowing around them, so I was going to make the area a rectangle fence that included both of the Bali/Evans cherries and make it easier to mow around. Just about the time I got all the tools together that I needed and got the fencing off, a friend came by, she had lost her sister the day before to cancer. People come first at Wicked Raven Farm, so we made some comfort food and some tea and we watched a funny movie with her to help her keep her mind off her sadness. I didnt get wire around the tree that night.
The next morning the hubby asked me if I had seen the cow and two calves that came through the yard? He said they really tore up that birch out by the garden! I asked if he had seen them at the cherry tree? He hadn't thought to look so off we went to see if it had been hit.
Boy had it been hit! I was so mad I could hardly see straight, they had stripped off all of the top layers of leaves. The above photo shows what was left of the cherry. They did leave me two of the cherries though so I quickly put some wire around it until I could get the project underway again. I thought - Okay - I have two cherries left so we will at least get to try some Wicked Cherries this year. The tree will grow back and it will all be ok. The rain began and it poured down - the project went on hold again, but at least it had wire around it again.
The next morning I had calmed down a bit, and as I get up a little earlier than the rest of the folks in the house - especially on a Sunday, I was sitting, drinking my coffee and reading my newspaper when I heard the distinctive cry of the Sand Hill Cranes. They frequent our yard, and although they dont eat as many slugs as I would like they do eat some of the yukky things. But this day as I watched them in relax mode, I saw one of them sneak up to the cherry tree, put his head through the fencing and.... yep - you guessed it - ate the last two cherries on the tree! I gave up farming for that whole Sunday! I Googled what Sand Hill Cranes eat? Because I could not believe that he had eaten my cherries and Google says they eat "everything"!! Of Course!
I am not a quitter though so on Monday after work I was feeling a little better not bitter so I went out to inspect the tree, and lo and behold - a reason to keep going - a lone cherry still hangs on the tree, tucked way back near the trunk. There is hope for the Wicked Cherries after all!
I had lunch with my mom and my niece on Tuesday of this week and as I was telling them about my rough go at farming, I though I was keeping the language under control but later my sister called me and left me a message full of laughter and said Ellie (the niece) told them about my troubles and at the end of the story added "Now, imagine that story only with a lot of "F" bombs in it"!
Keep calm and Farm on!
