Pruning Morello Cherries
Edward Olleson explains his method of achieving a perfectly trained Morello cherry tree.
Morellos are not to be confused with sweet cherries. Ferociously sour, they are not to be eaten raw, but they make delicious pies and flans. There is also a Balkan cherry soup, but even that requires a good deal of sugar.
Having struggled with the straggly beasts for many years (we are now on our third wonderful tree), failing to contain excessive end-growth, I have gradually devised a pruning method that works for me.
Wall-trained (the habit is too lax for a free-standing bush), a mature Morello is a marvellous sight in full bloom; the butter yellow autumn leaf colour is lovely too.Tying in is a laborious job once a year, but it is a rewarding one once it is done, and there is the choice between that and a tangled mess. Pruning, however, is not altogether straightforward. Conventional advice recommends pruning stone fruit only in leaf, to avoid the incursion of bacterial canker in dormancy, but, left so late, you cannot see what you are doing.
A compromise is to prune at green bud, when the sap is already rising but the buds are not so far advanced as to be vulnerable to being knocked off during tying in. Particularly low down the tree, Morellos tend to be shy in producing new growth. When there is a young shoot to replace spent wood, then what to do is plain. But you may find only an apparently barren fruited shoot with a few terminal buds, sometimes with further buds behind them but often without. What you cannot do is simply cut back to fruit, as you would spur an apple: without further buds beyond them to draw the sap (even two or three will probably be enough), the triple or multiple clusters will just die off. Even at the cost of stragglers, if there seems no prospect of fruit in the future, then cut back to the next junction or tip to two or three terminal buds and hope for another shoot to spring by next year. If space permits, long growth does no harm left for another season.
Edward Olleson
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