Hi Kubotabx2200, Thank so much for your suggestion. I have been debating a lot between NorthStar and Montmorency. Its not an easy decision for me. I love the look of dark red cherries. And they say NorthStar bears heavily too. And it stays a small tree. But since I already have two red cherries, my husband is pushing to get the dwarf Montmorency. Besides, my neighbor has a standard Montmorency (I am certain its a Montmorency, he does not know) and the birds and squirrels don't eat the fruit and they are tasty when cooked. Can you describe the flavor of NorthStar to me if you a little time? Yeshwant, I got my Surefire from Raintree and I planted it in 2004. It is a small tree no doubt. Now its just about 6 feet or so and upright. Last year it had flowers but set only a few fruit that fell off. This year it had many clusters of flowers and all of them have turned to baby fruit. I have big hopes for this tree(!) I don't have a picture of the tree in bloom but I could still take a picture now. But for the life of me I can't figure out how to post a picture into a message? So the answer is I think you will have to wait 2-3 years for good fruit on the Gisella 5 rootstock that Raintree sold it on. I live around Riverdale. Some parts of my yard does seem like 7a but some parts are definitely colder. The trouble with Starkbros is not that they sell you poor trees but that they don't tell you what the rootstock is so I don't have some important information. But I still did get some trees from Starkbros in the past and I ordered dwarfs only. However some of my trees turned out not to be dwarfs, they are huge. So I find them hit-or-miss. I think your Suerfire will grow quite a bit more, specially this year but it won't be a big tree. If I figure out how post pictures I will share. Katyajini

MDO: I have 4 tart cherry trees. The minute they are 1/2 pink, I know I have about 3 days tops to get them netted or the robins will eat them all. For me, robins are the worst culprit. This year I netted my North star and found one robin there every morning walking around the base looking for a way in. At least 3 times I came home from work to find a robin in the tree. I am sure he is the same robin! What a time trying to flush him out! After picking and pitting 15 quarts this year, I removed the net and left a few on the bottom of the tree for the birds. Not enough left to drag out the pitter for. That crazy bird came every morning for a good week and stuffed himself. I have to admire his love of cherries as he seems to want them as much as I do.

OK, I will throw in my $0.02. Yes, get the peach trees. Buy a dwarf so you can reach around the tree more easily. A full sized tree will be bigger than you want to deal with. What the others have said about removing fruit is a very real issue with a peach. If you don't do that you get TONS of too small fruit. Thin the fruits and you get much better results. One warning. If you don't pick the peaches, but let them fall off the tree and rot, you'll have more yellow jackets under that tree than you ever knew existed. Growing up outside of Philadelphia the next door neighbors had two full sized peach trees in their front yard which they never thinned and rarely picked. In August it was unsafe to walk in their front yard because of all the yellow jackets feasting upon the rotting fruit under those trees. Peaches and cherries are both in the genus "Prunus". The plants in that genus are subject to lots of pests (The plants don't devote many resources to protecting themselves. Instead they devote lots of resources to making fruit, so this is just the way things are and you have to reconcile yourself to this if you want to grow your own.) Sweet cherries and sour ("pie") cherries are two different species of "Prunus". Sweet cherries (mostly, with a couple of exceptions) require two different varieties near each other in order to make fruit because they (mostly) won't self-pollinate. None of that is true of sour cherries. One sour cherry tree standing by itself will make fruit. By & large sweet cherries are big trees. If you don't by a grafted, dwarf sweet cherry you'll someday have a tree that will be 20'-30' tall if it's happy. That's not so true of pie cherries, which are often naturally small trees (Of course, you may find that even one sour cherry produces more fruit than you want to deal with. That will depend upon your interest in cooking. Cherries are only ripe for a very short season, so you have to make sure you have time to do something with the cherries when the tree is ripe. Otherwise you've missed the point for a whole year. Both species of cherries also have a lot of pests, although probably not quite as many as peaches have. Oh! One final thought regarding cherries. THE BIRDS ARE FIENDS FOR CHERRIES! They usually eat the fruit while it's ripening, but before it's fully ripe, so you have to contend with the birds, too. Not all birds of course, but the fruit eating ones, eg., robins, starlings, mockingbirds, and catbirds. Don't buy those owl decoys. Waste of money. You'll probably soon decide that the only real way to keep some of the cherries for yourself is to cover the tree with netting just before the cherries start getting color. This is yet another BIG reason for making sure you buy a dwarf cherry! (As I said, the most commonly available pie cherries are naturally small, but if you want sweet cherries you will have to buy a dwarfed tree. You may only be able to find "semi-dwarf" sweet cherries. Even so, they will be smaller trees than the full sized ones will be. I've also read before that for sweet cherries, the birds are less interested in the "yellow" varities (like Rainier) than they are in the red ones. I have no personal experience with that.)

You should cut a couple of inches of the branches that have no leaves. Check to see if the cut areas have green cambium. If they are dry, brown, those are dead. You should trim them off and follow Konrad's advice on how to grow a new central lead for this tree. iyour tree probably on a dwarf rootstock. But usually even a dwarf chery rootstock, a tree could grow to 12-15 ft. Not sure how good is your soil.