Tree fruit
Sour cherry
Prunus cerasus
Timings for your region
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Never sown — bare-root plants go straight into the bed.
The harvest times are for an established plant — the first crop comes after 2–3 years.
Plantingmid October – late November
Harvestearly July – early August
Practical tip
Take ‘Morina’ or ‘Safir’, not ‘Schattenmorelle’. The latter is the widespread classic and also the most prone to Monilia blossom blight, which wilts whole shoots overnight — ‘Morina’ was bred against exactly that. Cut affected shoots well back into healthy wood.
Origin & history
The sour cherry is not a sour version of the sweet cherry but a species in its own right: a natural cross between wild cherry and steppe cherry, most likely from the country between the Black Sea and the Caspian. It travelled through Asia Minor into the Roman world and reached Central Europe with the monastery gardens; in southern Germany and Austria it is still called Weichsel, after the Slavic word for the fruit. The steppe cherry half explains two things that matter in a garden: it stays much smaller than a sweet cherry, and it is self-fertile — one tree on its own will crop.
Varieties
Two types stand side by side: morellos with dark red, staining juice, and amarelles with pale flesh and colourless juice that taste milder. Dresden-Pillnitz produced a whole run of tough morellos — “Morina”, “Safir”, “Karneol” and “Achat” — that differ in ripening date; two of them together spread the picking across the whole of July. “Schattenmorelle” is the classic almost every nursery stocks, and at the same time the most susceptible variety on offer. Ask which rootstock the tree is on when you buy: only Gisela 5 keeps it at a size you can still get a net over.
Care
Bare-root trees go in from mid-October to the end of November, with the graft union left a hand’s width above the soil — otherwise the scion roots into the ground and the dwarfing rootstock stops working. Gisela 5 anchors poorly and needs a permanent stake, plus 20 to 30 litres a week through the first three summers whenever it stays dry. Prune straight after harvest, not in winter: a sour cherry fruits on the one-year shoots made the season before, so each year you cut the spent, bare whips back to a young side shoot. Skip that and within a few years the crop has moved out to the tips of the branches.
What can go wrong
Monilia blossom blight gets in through the flower during bloom, so a cold, wet May decides the year, not the summer. Three things are in your hands: an open, airy crown, a site with air moving through it rather than the still corner of the garden, and taking every shrivelled mummified fruit off the tree in autumn — that is where the spores sit out the winter. The second loss is starlings; a flock clears a tree in two days. Netting of 2 cm mesh at most, laid over the whole crown before the fruit colours and closed around the trunk, is the only dependable answer.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
Sour cherries ripen over two to three weeks and are picked in several passes; once off the tree they get no sweeter. They are ready when the colour runs right up to the stalk and the stalk parts easily — take it with the fruit, or the cherry tears, bleeds juice and starts to rot on the branch. Unwashed they keep two or three days in the fridge and no longer. Stoned, they are the raw material for compote, cake, jam and Rote Grütze; frozen singly on a tray and only then bagged, they will not clump. The acidity is the whole point: cooked with sugar they hold a flavour where a sweet cherry falls flat.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.