No doubt about it, cherries are having a moment. Many buy whole, fresh cherries from the grocery store or farmer’s market, but if you get the chance to pick your own, you are in for a treat. They don’t come fresher than right off the tree, and the experience is both fun and memorable. However, there are a few things you need to know first.
Backyard gardener Susan Verhulst, with her husband, John, has been the steward of a Montmorency sour cherry tree in their Iowa yard for the past eight years. Before moving into a house with a cherry tree, the couple knew absolutely nothing about how to take care of one. Now, they’re total pros—picking and pitting like it’s their job for two weeks in June, sharing the bounty with friends and neighbors, and turning out some killer cherry crisp.
“The best way is to learn by making mistakes, and I’ve certainly had a lot of those,” Verhulst says. Here she shares her tips, tricks, and learnings both for picking cherries and for growing them.
Refrigerate for Less Mess
You might think chilling cherries is all about taste or making them last longer, but that’s not the only reason to give them a rest in the fridge. Verhulst has found that chilled cherries make less of a mess when it comes time to pit them. Cherries that come right off the tree are usually warm, which means if you pit them right away, the juice will flow and make a major mess. Instead, chill the washed cherries for a couple of hours to overnight before pitting to help them firm up and control the juice.
Chill to Chase Out the Bugs
Backyard cherries often have bugs in them—cherry fruit fly larvae, to be exact. It sounds disgusting, but it’s quite common, especially if you’re unwilling to use harsh chemical pesticides to treat the problem. Rest assured, the larvae are harmless. Yes, it would be nauseating to realize you’ve eaten one inside a cherry, but not dangerous. Luckily, the fix is easy. Just chill the cherries overnight, and the bugs will exit the cherries to try to escape from the cold. You’ll find the larvae, which look like grains of white rice, at the bottom of the container and on the cherries, where they can be easily rinsed off.
“You know, it does my heart a little bit good knowing that it doesn’t hurt if you eat them,” Verhulst says. “They’re not a parasite. They’re not gonna hurt you. They’re just a little extra protein.”
Use Neem Oil to Treat Bugs
If you’re growing a cherry tree and you want to eat the fruit, you’re likely going to have to treat for bugs. “The most difficult thing was learning what to spray and when,” Verhulst says. After some trial and error, Verhulst turned to her local university extension service. The experts there suggested neem oil, which is a natural pesticide that does not contain harmful chemicals.
Since then, Verhulst has been spraying her tree with concentrated neem oil that has been diluted in water and loaded into a two-gallon pump sprayer. She does this weekly, beginning after the blossoms are gone and ending when the growing season is done. “If you spray it too early, the pollinators can’t do their thing,” she says.
Verhulst admits neem oil is not as effective as a chemical pesticide such as malathion, but she’s not willing to use something so toxic. “Malathion is also really bad on all the other beneficial bugs,” she says. She sticks with neem oil because it is safe for use on food. “It’s something that you can spray while the cherries are already out, and then you just wash it off and it’s okay,” Verhulst says.
Prune for Air Flow
Besides spraying the tree with neem oil and watering it during a drought, Verhulst also prunes her tree regularly. “Apparently, you get fewer pests and better crops if you keep the little branches that don’t produce much fruit trimmed away so the air can get through the tree. So I’ve started to fairly aggressively prune it,” she says. You can do this either very early in the spring or at the end of the growing season, which Verhulst prefers because at that time it’s easier to see which branches aren’t in good shape and need to be removed.