I was wondering if anyone knew about propagating the suckers of what I believe is a wild/choke cherry tree. Do the suckers become more of a shrub? What do I need to do to move these plants? I don't have a picture right now, but it is a reddish leaf medium tree with the new growth green that fades to red of the rest of the plant. Any info would be helpful. Thank you.

Rob, The most prevalent stone fruit virus I hear of is X disease (technically not a virus, but behaves like a virus). Supposedly any trees on mahaleb will die fairly quickly. They say a lot of wild chokecherry carry the disease. I really don't know much about identifying viruses in stone fruit, but I think the bad ones are pretty obvious (ringspot viruses, dwarf virus and plum pox). The only experience of wild cherry I have is the sort of wild cherry in my backyard. About 10 years ago my father-in-law dug up a seedling under some grafted cherry tree and planted the seedling in my backyard. The foliage is healthy other than sometimes it gets cherry leaf spot (Surprisingly the fruit is really pretty decent.) The disadvantage is that it sends up tons of suckers I have to keep mowed off.

Kevin, Good questions. I wouldn't be overly concerned about rootstock. While rootstocks can convey characteristics like tree size reduction, increased precocity, cold tolerance, water tolerance, etc., unless you have a specific need, standard roots will do fine. Konrad offered some good information as usual, although I might question that poor vigor is a problem with fruit trees on their own roots. A big part of the reason nurseries suggest planting the graft union above the soil line on dwarf trees is so the scion portion doesn't root out and cause the tree to lose it's dwarfing characteristics. Here's a little background. Rootstocks dwarf by nature of some degree of incompatibility with the scion. This incompatibility disrupts the flow of carbohydrates and other nutrients producing a smaller sized tree. There is good research indicating the larger the portion of dwarf rootstock sticking up out of the ground, the greater the degree of incompatibility. Limiting the nutrient flow can cause positive things like increasing cold tolerance (i.e. forcing the tree into dormancy earlier) but many times it produces a more delicate tree requiring a higher level of management. Perhaps a biological analogy would be raising two children, one with optimum nutrition, the other on half rations. In most cases, the less fortunate child would be weaker, smaller, more prone to illness, and shorter lived. Sometimes the degree of incompatibility is too great, causing either long term graft failure or simply breakage at the graft union. Occasionally a rootstock will increase the flow of nutrients compared to a standard rootstock and produce a larger more vigorous tree. This happens only seldom. Generally it's the other way around. Naturally one might expect the fruit to be smaller on dwarf trees as well, but this is not the case. The reason being that most of the energy going into the fruit comes from the leaves, not the roots. In fact, the leaves export a significant amount of energy into the roots. That's why partially girdling a branch (i.e. choking it with a wire) will generally produce bigger fruit on that branch. The leaves use all their energy for the fruit with little or nothing to the root. This is also the reason some dwarf roots will produce marginally larger fruit. More leaf energy goes to the fruit and less to the roots. In times past, people were much less concerned about rootstock. Grafted apples were on seedling rootstock from Red Delicious apples. The primary reason Red Delicious seed was used was because Red Delicious was the most apple, and therefore the most common seed. Processing plants could collect large volumes of seed as they processed the apples The seed was inexpensive to purchase and trees performed fairly consistently on the rootstock. Same thing with peaches. Lovell rootstock was popularized because Lovell used to be a popular canning peach. Canners could sell the seed inexpensively. As far as I know, Lovell isn't canned today, but the seed hasn't lost popularity. Halford is still commercially canned today and is also a popular roostock. I grow my own peach roostock and haven't noticed any difference in performance from my own seedling rootstock and other more popular rootstocks like Halford, Lovell, etc. What you have described above is indeed called air layering. The reason most trees are not propagated by air layering is because it's much more economical to graft and success rates are generally higher. Lastly as an interesting aside, in rare cases the rootstock can convey it's own traits to the fruit. Tomatoes can be grafted onto poisonous nightshade plants (to which they are closely related). If grafted, the tomatoes will contain some of the poisonous alkaloids found in the rootstock.

First year growing MWC. It is an amazingly huge plant with impressive production. The taste is as sweet as it's reputation. My only knock on it is: 1. Very small fruit So I knew it was going to be small, but I guess I didn't know it would be that small. I'm also growing a variety called "Coyote" which is very productive like MWC, sweet like MWC, but yellow. I just wish I would get more bang per tomato in terms of size. I like the cherry size that are large enough to cut in half and add to salads. 2. Cemented to the vine So, staying on put on the vine is a good thing, but my MWC is almost cemented to it. When I pull them off, sometimes it's yummy meat inside stays with the vine. This makes it somewhat difficult to remove. Granted, this is early in the season and maybe this behavior will change. What I'd really love is a cherry tomato, the size of Magic Mountain but sweet like MWC. Does anyone have any suggestions? smithmal This post was edited by smithmal on Mon, Aug 4, 14 at 22:26