I have 4yo trees from raintree. Dwarf 4in1 on G-5 rootstock. There are 2 trees. The beginning of May the bees were all over them, bumblebees, worker bees, even carpenter bees! There were hundreds of white flowers. The varieties are lapins, mont, stella, royal anne. The amount of cherries i am seeing now is amazing! These trees are 10 ft high by 5 ft wide. I use snakes to scare the birds away. Sounds like a pollination problem. When the blooms flower its only for a few days, so if you can, keep an eye on them during the sunny afternoon hours. Watch the bee traffic around the flowers. This is the first year i did this and was amazed at what i saw! There are 150 to 200 cherries on these two trees. Hope my dollar store snakes do their job this season! :) Awesome thread and posts!

Fruit trees are pruned much differently than ornamentals and for entirely different reasons. It's not the removal of the leader that concerns me (the central leader is almost always removed when pruning many types of fruit trees), but the possible severity of the pruning. It sounds like this guy may have tried to catch up on 10 to 12 years of pruning all at once (which is not a good thing). It's hard to tell without a picture (and maybe without a before and after picture) whether the tree was properly pruned. If it were my tree, I'd post pictures in the Fruit and Orchards Forum and ask them for opinions and further maintenance pruning suggestions. Water sprouts (the limbs growing straight up) are a result of the pruning. They will need to be removed and/or trained into a more horizontal direction. Again, advice on accomplishing this can be found in the Fruit and Orchards Forum. I've been wanting to write a set of basic fruit tree pruning instructions for a while now, but still haven't started that project. There's lots more info than I could type out in one sitting.

answer me this batman.. who paints the trees in the forest.. that live a couple hundred years.. no one!!!! if God had meant trees to be painted.. he would have given the trees arms to paint themselves .. and very large cars to get to the paint store... dont you think ... listen to me... with NO INSULT to the root mass.. these trees will explode with advantageous growth.. it is imperative.. that you properly prune them before that growth ... stuff happens.. you know what i mean.. and you remove DAMAGED parts.. and then let the plant.. next year.. respond ... if after next year or the year after .. you find that it needs some guidance.. or shaping ... then think about that then ... simply repair or remove damage.. and then give them time to get their act together ... put simply.. i am of the opinion.. that damaged parts are removed IMMEDIATELY .... w/o hesitation.. and without thought as to when the proper time is.. i prune trees.. when i walk by with the saw.. 24/7/365 .... the proper time to remove damage.. was 2 hours before you made this post ... if there is damage high up.. and it threatens anything or anyone.. hire that job out.... or die in your sleep when it falls on your house .. a bit of drama there.. to motivate you .. lol .. ken

Iseltzer: We have jap beatles all around me yet luckily so far, they are not in big numbers where I am at. 30 miles away they are horrendous so I suppose some day they will be a problem for me. I grow grapes too so I hope they stay away. When they come, I will try carbaryl since I heard it is supposed to work great on jap beatles. I grow tart cherries too and find I must net at the first sign of pink on the fruits. If you wait a few days longer, it will be amazing how much of the crop just vanishes to birds. Even with a net I got one crafty robin who always walked around the tree every morning and finally found some way in. Very hard to remove the birds once inside the netting. Thankfully I only had that happen twice. Never did find any opening how it got in. My biggest pest with cherries is birds. I do spray for curculio, cherry fruit fly, cherry leaf spot (if and when it happens). I do not spray once the tree is netted so I have had an outbreak or two of powdery mildew if we get very cloudy and rainy weather for a long period at this stage but it was only bad once and more so on some varieties than others. Cuculio season here runs potentially from petal fall to about mid-June. Just before I net, I like to spray one last time at the first sign of pink on any fruit and that seems to do the trick for me (only found one larvae in all the fruit I picked and pitted over the years). If I get leafspot, I will spray chlorothalonil AFTER harvest as not cleared for cherries after shuck-split stage in spring. Not a huge issue so far except for one year and again definite differences in susceptibility based on variety. Most of this pertains to my tart cherries since I have only tried growing sweets the past few years. I do not think they will be much different that the tarts as far as birds,insects and disease issues except that I avoid using Imidan insecticide on the sweets due to phytotoxicity.