There are 3 huge 40-year-old dessert cherries in my garden. Two of them belong to the late ones, and one is a bird cherry with small and sweet fruits. The latter was planted for the company to pollinate the others.The yieldsare indeed large and the fruit is tasty. Unfortunately, starlings often ate everything. I tried to cover the treeswith a plastic net with a netIt was hard to throw, and even harder to take off.
Nest boxes
Looking for help in specialized magazines, I finally found some good advice. Supposedly, the best protection against starlings is … they themselves.It is enough to attachnest breeding boothon the tree, and the whole starling family will fight intruders until death, defending their area.
I built a suitable house and fixed it on a bird cherry trunk, about 4 m above the ground. And what turned out? Indeed, the massive raids of starlings have stopped. We have so many cherries that it is enough to pick them from the lower branches and leave the rest on the tree. The fight betweenstarlingshas not been observed. However, my face fell a bit when it turned out that my booth was not inhabited. So where does this change come from? Well, a few years ago, some of my new neighbors planted earlycherrieswhich are starting to bear fruit right now. So my guess is that they are the starlings that satisfy their appetite.
Low-growing varieties
However, not only birds threaten cherries. No less dangerous are thepestsanddiseasesIt seems that the only solution is low-growing and self-pollinating cherries.There are many varieties to choose from and they can be planted relatively densely - every 4 m. They start fruiting early and give easy access to the fruit growing on the top. No problem
neither with spraying nor coveringwith a net- it can be unfastened with wires fixed to pegs so that it does not touch the branches.
Bogusław Słoński
