If you just bought a bare-rooted cherry this year, I recommend to let it be, as grafts will be harder to take on one with "shocked" roots. Besides, sour cherry grafted on sweet cherry have some compatibility issues, but grafting together is possible. Wait for next year. English Morello is always seen at the CRFG exchange.

Also, later in the season, like fall, you can give the local CRFG member a call and you can do a T-budding. Half of my cherry cultivars I t-budded myself and I have a 10-in-1 sweet cherry tree. I have not grafted any of the sour cherries though.

Latest Low chill cherries from DWN:

The Minnie Royal and Royal Lee sweet cherries are the new entries I have seen in years. Perhaps these may have some chance in some parts of South CA and the Bay Area where you get lower chills. These are new and needed to be tested by brave backyard growers. I can't find a DWN retail nursery that are selling these at the moment, at least not within an hour drive from Davis.

DWN Cherries

Minnie Royal: Medium-sized red cherry; firm with good flavor; ripens 11-14 days ahead of Bing; tree is very productive with a low chill requirement; mainly used as a pollinizer for Royal Lee; pollenized by Royal Lee (U.S. Plant Patent # 12942 - Zaiger)

Royal Lee: Medium-large red cherry; heart-shaped, very firm with excellent flavor; ripens 11-14 days ahead of Bing; tree is very productive with a low chill requirement; pollenized by Minnie Royal(U.S. Plant Patent # 12472 - Zaiger)

And this one that's old news:
Royal Rainier: a red-blushed "white" variety from Zaiger; large, firm, yellow cherry with very good to excellent quality that ripens ahead of Rainier, holds well on tree, pollenizer required - cross compatible with Bing (U.S. Plant Patent # 10790). Reported to bear fruits for some CRFG members in South California.

I want to plant a Royal Rainier cherry. I see that Bing is is a necessary pollenizer. I'm worried that I may not have enough chill in my area for cherries. Can Minnie Royal be used for a pollenizer with its low chill requirement. Does anyone have experience with cherries in Santee? Thanks, Ron

Joereal, I asked about special ordering those two new cherries from my local nursery and I was told that they are commercial cultivars and not available to the retail trade - this from Tom Spellman. However, I noticed that Laguna Hills Nursery has both on their list for 2007. The unfortunate thing is, they are apparently only available on Mazzard. Not that you could't change that in the flash of a grafting knife....

What about Delight and Sprite, the two cherry-plum hybrids? Has anyone had any experience with them? I've read they are low chill, too.

I bought Delight at a plant sale (home grafted even though it is still under patent). I seem to remember it had a couple fruits on it the first year although the wildlife got them before I did. We had a warm winter, around 263 chill hours last year so it appears to be tentatively low chill.

Minnie Lee and Royal Lee are available for 2008 online from Bay Laurel Nursery. Yippee!

If one has insufficient chill hours, will there be any fruit, or just reduced fruit? I'm trying to figure out why we used to get a good amount of cherries at our old house but almost none at the new house, and I'm thinking it has to do with chilling hours. Although the homes are about a mile apart, the old tree was behind a wooden fence at the edge of a creekbed where cold air seemed to pull through. The new tree is on a property that's slightly sloping and has a huge watershed basin on the other side of the street, so I suspect that's where the cold air pools. We have very little frost at the new location and seem to do better with subtropicals than stone fruit all of a sudden. Last winter, with it being colder than normal, we did see a bump in crops. Just wondering if this is the most likely culprit for low cherry yields. We are in Walnut Creek, CA. If we have a little microclimate in our new neighborhood, then we would be interested in finding these lower chill trees as well.

I'm sorry, I believe I "mispoke" - Minnie Lee and Royal Lee are available mail order from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply on semi-dwarfing rootstock. However, from Dave Wilson Nursery's website you can see what nurseries in your county ordered what trees from them and pinpoint a nursery that will get them in as bareroot stock. Save on shipping.

Kerrican2001 it sounds like you have already figured it out. Low chill cherries may be the thing for your new location.

Rainier Cherry setting blossom south of Los Angeles. It's in zone 10, but we had an unusually cold winter this year.

As you can see there's no shortage of blooms.

Interestingly it bloomed just 1 week after my Royal Minnie Lee. The Rainier is in a spot that is partially shaded, I think that makes a big difference in this climate.

(Don't pay any attention to the generic looking cherry tag attached to the tree, it was cleary marked as Rainier when I bought it for just $12.50 in September last year, and this picture was just taken today)

location is only 9 miles North of San Clemente, off the 5 freeway

One thought, if cherries are having trouble setting fruit, it could be a pollination issue. There are not a lot of plants around here that set bloom around this same time. That means there are not going to be a lot of bees. The bees do not seem to appear until later in the season. This might have to do with the type of flowering plants that are prevalent in this region, everything is interconnected. What I mean, for example, is that none of the people here have apple or cherry trees, those fruit trees so common in other parts of the country.