I too am in PA and wanted a Rainier but not sure how it would take in this climate. Instead I purchased a White Gold on Gisela 5 from Raintree last spring as it is a gold cherry with a red blush so I am hoping it is somewhat similar to a Rainier. The taste is supposed to be great. I am container growing my tree in a 20-25 gallon container. It's done very well so far and is a little over 6 ft. I haven't done any pruning yet. I just repotted it in a 5-1-1 mix of pine bark fines, peat, and perlite with Fruit Trees Alive organic fertilizer and pruned half of the roots off (a week ago) and now the leaf buds are all opening beautifully and I think we are going to get some fruit this year. It seemed to take to the new mix and root pruning surprisingly well. I will probably have to top prune it down a little after the end of this growing season.

This orchard in North Georgia http://www.mercier-orchards.com/pages/ContactUs.aspx from 10-4 weekends the next three weeks has pick your own sweet cherries from their orchard with about 12 varieties and about 100 cherry trees total. Trust me, any fruit person will be impressed if you visit this orchard whether for cherries, blueberries, apples, etc... From what i have learned on this forum i tried to pick the cherries which were near leaves/branches getting full sun, darker the riper for the "bing" type sweet cherries, etc. but since they really don't use pesticides you can mouth sample in the field to taste for sweetness (brix?). But fruitnut, when looking at a cluster of cherries some will be dark red (peak brix and ripe?) and others slightly lighter red (not quite peak brix?) and thus are your experiments showing that ripe cherries today won't have as high a brix as ripe cherries in say a few weeks when the tree hit peak brix? I sampled from the sunned, shaded and partial sun sections of the same sweet cherry trees and found if all were dark black they were all deliciously sweet and equal in my opinion. I will return in a couple weeks to pick again to see if they seem any sweeter. Does it matter what time of day you pick the sweet cherries or just as long as they are sweet and not going too soft that is as good as it gets? They had hormone traps to catch bugs instead of using sprays and apparently there aren't enough bird, deer, squirrels, etc. in the area to eat enough cherries to hurt overall production! The cherry trees were pruned to be no more than 8 feet tall , they had irrigation available and didn't seem to have any special mulch under the trees (grass in between rows and bare ground under the trees since nothing will grow in the shade). PS- the cherries off the tree were better than anything i have ever purchased at the local grocery store. Fruitnut, have you ever tested grocery store cherry brix?

Yes those are all compatible. It doesn't matter which is next to which. As long as you have almost any three varieties in the same planting you will be OK. The bees will spread the pollen around as needed. With all the varieties you have there won't be any issues with compatible pollen.

Birds :-) They seem to know at least a day before you do that the cherries are ripe. And then tell all their friends. Birds are kind of a big deal with ripe cherries......more so than with most other fruit trees. When I was growing up we had a full sized Montmorency, a Rainier and two Bings in our garden and my dad used to hang old tin pie plates from the trees, my Grannie's old foxfur scarf (looked like two flattened foxes biting each others' tails) and sat out on the patio with his sling shot beaning every bird that he could see. We still only got maybe a third of the crop.