There are many reasons for the buds falling off. The flowers may have not been pollinated, the tree could be too immature to set, or you may have gotten shoot blight (its a form of brown rot). Brown rot always ends up being a problem on cherries, usually the fruit rots as it ripens. The shoot blight form is less common. You need to spray lime-sulphur plus oil at delayed dormant -- just before the leaves come out. Then, spray sulphur around the rainy periods during the spring. Roughly three sprays total in an average year. Use a sticker with the sulphur to keep it on the tree. Also when you get fruit watch out for the bugs, you may need to spray Surround to irritate them. Sweet cherries are hard to grow organically outside of the west coast, but its possible. I grew mine 100% organic for 10+ years. Now I do one spray of propiconazole in the spring, for brown rot, and all the rest is organic. Black Gold is a relatively good sweet cherry. I had half of mine crack in the heavy rains this spring, but thats standard for sweet cherries in our climate (and another thing that makes them difficult). Scott

I think I agree with John - and my one calycanthus is too little to have flowered yet, so I don't have that to wish for, yet - but it will be almost impossible to keep weeds, including new calycanthus, from sprouting. I have had relatively good luck with laying down cardboard or 4-6 sheets of newspaper, and mulching over that 4-6 in. of shredded wood mulch. BUT, it wasn't much of a hill, and I planted shrubs or established plants in it, not seeds. Can you use the above ideas for winter-sowing and bottom-less boxes to start seeds for the initial spreading of the "wildflowers", and then transplant individual plantlets from the 'bunches', come spring? As John said, you will have job security - no-one else would want it! And, you do, I know have to show willing to follow her desires, and and have something to show for your efforts come the spring. You would almost have to use a Bobcat to even make a token clearing out of the hill, and it will make an awful mess! I would think doing it by hand would take a couple of weeks..., and also make a mess, half of which would probably wash down the hill into the lake, and get the HOA mad at them, even if you put up silt fences.... Opting for the best of bad choices, if it were me, I would try for the "spotty" smaller swathes of flowers, and not for the massive sweep that the client may have had in her mind's eye.... If for no other reason, that it ain't gonna happen, unless you go for all-out chemical warfare, and mess up the lake and do major damage to YOUR sensibilities! Not to mention what it might do to your license, if you used the heavy guns near water, and it came out.... I think the herbicide for near water works, just not quite as well or as quickly as Round-Up. Anyway, good luck, and let us know what you are able to persuade your client into.

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.

Down here by the cities, it seems very localized the damage (frost pockets). What I have seen damage too is Smoketree, Red Oak, American linden, Korean/Japanese maples and their hybrids. Thats all that's obvious at moment. I think those coldest spots got 26-28 degrees Saturday morning and 28-30 degrees this morning. Shrub perennial damage seems more widespread in those same spots. The first couple of feet above the ground must have gotten quite cold. There are shrubs toasted around the base but fine on top.