Thanks for the suggestion. I also have run across the Almaden Duke that Raintree offers but am not aware of any first-person evaluations of it, so it is a bit of an unknown to me. If anyone has tried the Almaden Duke, I'd be interested in hearing your impressions of it. I looked for it at Andy Mariani's cherry tasting this past summer and did not see it. He did have at least one seedling Mazzard (which Raintree reports as the believed parentage) which were interesting, but not outstanding, FWIW.

ok, this thread is once again active! "Not so sure about the "unsual" I had cataract surgery and had two in one eye.!! Dr had never seen that before. When the other eye developed the expected cataract there were 3. They took photos and documented the removal but no write up in JAMA .That I'm aware of . He did give me a 3 for one price break though lol. gary" Gary, If you were 'normal', you wouldn't need eye surgery. Whatever your surgeon finds under a microscopic view is a 'bonus' . Be grateful that you weren't "written-up" ! I had cataract surgeries done at age 54. After the second one was completed, the surgeon remarked that the odds of my dual responses were 1:10,000. As far as she was concerned, a once in a career event. She was excited. I didn't give a s*#t She didn't give me any discounts. IF she had given me a discount, I might have been excited except that the surgeries were covered 100% by my insurance plans. No complaints. --Stitz--

Potted trees are lots of work and don't think I'll go that route... yet We had a longer cold winter then last year...about the same low temp. of around minus 32C which is the critical temp. for flower buds to die off. More fruiting buds died off then last year. On the Lapin I have a double leader...one completely died back, the other is alive all the way up with all fruiting buds dead, only some lower branches have some fruit on. The other trees are all green to the top but most of the fruiting buds got winter killed also.

Leftwood, After talking with Bors about these previous experiments at Sask grafting high I found out it applied only to using less than 2 year old pie cherry seedlings as scions. Apparently such seedlings when less than 2 years old grow out of sync. and often winter kill (when left growing that way) where as the more mature bigger trees work in sync. (stop growing soon enough). Using these young scions when grafting high to mature trees makes them change to act more mature... thus the act of grafting high saves tender seedling types from otherwise freezing to death. In light of these facts it now appears that maybe grafting high tender varieties on a hardy rootstock no longer applies the way I used to think because it applies to making seedlings cold hardier which in itself might have nothing to do with how hardy the rootstock your grafting to is... Notice I said might. So I'm going to give it a shot using sweet cherries high on the hardy Amur cherry anyways. Who knows. Grafting on Amur cherry is good anyways for vole prevention. Has anyone seen a moose eat Amur cherry? I havn't. Neither has Dr. Bors seen it. He's tasted them and says the reason must be that the wood is too tart. He's also pulled opened freezers with his hybrid pie cherries inside and says the whole freezer smells really great (ie. compelling to herbivores) as of sweet cherries.