Managing Your UFO Cherries
In an earlier post we described the fundamentals of growing and training cherry trees to the UFO system. This training system is easy to understand and simple to execute when everything goes according to the instructions. The challenge always is what do I do if they don’t grow like the they are supposed to according […]
Upright Fruiting Offshoot (UFO) Sweet Cherry Training
Many visitors to Cloud Mountain are intrigued by our ‘cherry tunnel’. This upright fruiting system (UFO) is an unusual way of growing sweet cherries. It was initially developed for commercial growers, but can be adapted to home gardens and market farms as well. The Upright Fruiting Offshoots (UFO) system for sweet cherries was developed to: […]
Pruning Sweet Cherries
One important note: always prune cherries when you will have at least 2 days of dry weather. This can help reduce canker. Most people grow sweet cherries as freestanding ‘bush’ shaped trees. In a future post, we’ll talk about growing sweet cherries as an espalier or fruiting wall form called UFO (upright fruiting offshoot). Cherry […]
Summer Harvest Day and Open House
Sunday, August 18 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Cloud Mountain Farm Center will be hosting an Open House and Summer Harvest Day. This is an opportunity for you to come out and visit to learn about the various crop and production trials and internship program happening here. We’ll have stations set up with a […]
UFO Cherries
or Upright Fruiting Offshoot Cherries An ongoing project at Cloud Mountain is ‘the cherry tunnel’. In 2005, we began this growing trial in which we grow sweet cherries inside a 180′ long, 32′ wide high tunnel, trained to a trellis system. Why grow cherries this way? Sweet cherries in Western Washington have several challenges, especially […]