Morello cherry, ways of training

[Dr Pips]

Hi all,

I've just ordered a morello cherry tree, (bit of an impulse buy) from Pomona fruits. I'm planing on putting it in a large pot in our north facing garden. The spot I have in mind does get sun, and that's why I went morello as it claims to tolerate a bit of shade.

I've also read a little about training them as fans or cordons, but don't really know the difference.

I've also thought that possibly instead of in a pot, I could maybe take a couple of slabs up from the patio and build a planter against the brick wall. The wall is south facing in a north facing garden, so gets a reasonable amount of sun.

Any suggestions?

[Llamas]

I would really consider getting it out of the pot. Means theres one less thing to worry about watering and they usually grow better in my experience.

Training fruit trees is daunting at first, but it's just a matter of getting stuck in and doing a little homework before you go tieing things up and cutting off bits.

There are two basic types of ways that fruit trees grow their fruit. You have spur fruiting and non-spur fruiting.

Non-spur fruiting trees produce most of their flowers and fruits on the tips of new growth. So this spring, they will only be able to make flowers and fruit on the ends of the youngest twigs and branches that will have grown last summer.

Spur fruiting trees make their flowers and fruit on long-lived little tiny braches or 'spurs' that come off the main branches. This can sound like pretty much the same thing until you see them for yourself.

Cordon-training I think is best suited to spur fruiting cultivars rather then new-wood fruiters, but I may be (and am often) wrong. They like sort of like sticks with little spurs coming off where the fruit grows. Basically, there is only one upright branch and in summer (June-July) you cut off all the side shoots back to three or five buds. This makes your spurs when the buds closest to the stem flower and fruit and sometimes the top one grows off into a shoot (which you cut back in due course). Oblique cordons are where you angle the 'stick' at about 45 degrees or so to further check the growth by slowing down the rate at which the sap zooms around the plant. So long as the plant is healthy and vigorous enough, this means less fluff (leaves) and more flowers and fruit.

Fans are fan-shaped, where the branches are each trained flat against the wall. These are suitable for both types of fruiters, and I think they look especially gorgeous. Have a look at these sites for some further explanations on pruning trained Morello trees.
Pruning
General care and more pruning advice

Go halfway down the page for cordon drawings

Hope this helps and if I've gone wrong someone more knowledgeable will step in soon and save you being led astray.

[Dr Pips]

Excellent, thanks for the advice!

[Alison]

I am training mine as a fan, very attractive and good for production.

[Dr Pips]

I've built my planter (quite chuffed with myself,mix not normally very handy). It's 1.2 metres long and 0.6metres wide, and about 4 brick courses deep. The pleasing thing was when I dug the slabs up, the soil underneath although heavy clay was wet, so at least the slabs aren't stopping all the water.

What kind of muck would you recommend putting in the hole? I've read somewhere John innes number 3.

[Llamas]

Lovely planter, well done! I'd try and break up that heavy clay though!

A strong coffee, a garden fork and a bag full of grit and another of compost, -John Innes no 3 is fine- is what you want. Oh, and ideally someone else to do the heavy digging, but failing that you want to get stuck in and try to wrench up as much clay as you can bear, then dig in the compost and grit. You want to give those roots plenty of breathing space in case the clay traps a lot of water too close to the tree. While finding wet clay sounds like it might be doing some of the work for you, it could mean that you plant your tree and start training it, only to find that it struggles and eventually dies because the cold wet clay has suffocated the roots.
Think of all the joy and beauty your lovingly trained tree will give you when you're despairing at the heavy going of digging out the clay and mixing the the grit and compost in. You only have to do this bit once, and the better you do it, the better the tree will grow.
Some fan trained cherry trees to keep you inspired:

Cherry

Cherry

[Dr Pips]

That's my weekend planned then! Think I might need more than one bag of each, it's a pretty big planter. Should I mix the clay soil with the good stuff, in a wheel barrow of something?

With the tree itself, I've read a lot about training, but if it has any blossom this year, I'm assuming I should remove it and not let it fruit this year. What about next year?

[Dr Pips]

So the tree has arrived. Any ideas for how to fan train it? It looks a bit more advanced than I was expecting