Cherries Are brown, please Help!!

[Miked111414]

Hello everyone, new to the site and could use some help identifying what’s wrong with my cherries. It’s a second year dwarf cherry tree and already producing fruit. The problem is that the cherries are turning brown and shriveling. I looked up some common disease and the one that stands out is brown cherry rot. The pictures that I see of brown rot shows them with furry mold on them, mine doesn’t have this and is why I’m stumped. I took some pictures and any insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Sean Regan]

That looks like our Stella cherry tree which was three years old when we bought it two years ago.
Some of the blossom never gets pollinated, so these cherries when really tiny tend to fall off. We have also lost some which I think is down to not enough water so those are shrivelling, but many others are doing OK at the moment and rippening.

So with mine I think there were three problems.

Lack of polination.
Too many cherries for the tree to support
Not enough water a week or so back when we had a long dry spell.

This was back in May.

Thinking about it now, it may seem obvious that there were possibly too many cherries on it for such a young tree,

I'm hoping there's nothing wrong with it (and yours) and it will do better next year when the roots are more established.

 

[Miked111414]

That looks like our Stella cherry tree which was three years old when we bought it two years ago.
Some of the blossom never gets pollinated, so these cherries when really tiny tend to fall off. We have also lost some which I think is down to not enough water so those are shrivelling, but many others are doing OK at the moment and rippening.

So with mine I think there were three problems.

Lack of polination.
Too many cherries for the tree to support
Not enough water a week or so back when we had a long dry spell.

This was back in May.

View attachment 66810

Thinking about it now, it may seem obvious that there were possibly too many cherries on it for such a young tree,

I'm hoping there's nothing wrong with it (and yours) and it will do better next year when the roots are more established.

Thank you for the info! I didn’t know they could produce fruit without pollination. This is my second year with fruit trees, I also planted a peach tree last year and it too seems to be producing fruit which I’m quite surprised. I thought for sure it would take a few years before I saw anything. Good luck with you cherry tree!

 

[Sean Regan]

Cherry update.

As bees don't always visit each flower on a plant, I tried brushing my hand across the blossom in the spring to attempt to get more pollination this year and it seems to have worked.

I took these photos today.

They don't look too bad.

Here you can see some of the unpollinated, dead fruit which hasn't yet fallen off , similar to what you have.

The net is to keep the birds off them.

 

[Miked111414]

I’ll have to try that next year. Mines a Stella cross. Was also thinking of getting a bing dwarf. Not sure if that will help with pollinating