The most complete description of the Iput cherry variety

The word "cherry" is associated with the hot southern sun, the Black Sea and the ancient Greek city of Kerasund. It was there that the Romans saw this plant several millennia ago and gave it the name Cerasus avium.

The traditional regions of sweet cherry cultivation lie in warm regions. Until recently, it was difficult to imagine that this crop could be grown in the cold climate of Central Russia. But, as Napoleon said, "genius consists in the ability to distinguish the difficult from the impossible." The breeders got down to business, and the Iput cherry was born.

How a southerner became a northerner

It all started with the Lupine Institute in the Bryansk region. There, in the fruit-growing department, a unique geneticist Mayina Vladimirovna Kanshina has been working for more than forty years. She devoted all her talent and all her life to breeding cold-resistant varieties of sweet cherries.

Variety Iput is a "daughter" of selection forms numbered 3-36 and 8-14. After crossing them, many years of nurturing and strict selection of hybrid seedlings followed. In 1993, a new sweet cherry variety was included in the register of selection achievements and recommended for cultivation in the Central and Central Black Earth Region of Russia. Mayina Vladimirovna gave her name to her brainchild from the name of the Iput River flowing through the Bryansk region.

Cherry Iput: variety description

Practical gardeners, thinking about acquiring a new "tenant" for their garden, are guided by several parameters: the size of an adult tree, early maturity, early maturity, resistance to weather and other conditions, and yield. For convenience, all characteristics of Iput cherries are collected in the table:

Thus, the advantages of the Iput variety include:

• winter hardiness;
• disease resistance;
• compactness of the tree;
• high productivity and large-fruited;
• excellent taste of fruits and their universal purpose;
• good transportability and keeping quality good for cherries;
• early maturity.

A few cons:

• tendency to cracking the fruit;
• self-infertility;
• exactingness to the ground.

Landing

The harvest starts from a seedling, like a theater from a hanger. Therefore, you need to choose a seedling for your site very meticulously.

1. Sweet cherries are usually planted at the age of 2 years. A two-year-old seedling should have 3-4 well-developed lateral shoots.
2. If you are purchasing a seedling with an open root system, you need to inspect it. The roots should not be rotten, dry, healthy roots have a creamy color when cut.
3. The thickness of the trunk of a good cherry seedling is about 2 cm.
4. Wrinkled bark is a sign that the plant has dried out. Also, there should be no build-ups, cracks, or bulges on the trunk.
5. It is important to clarify on which rootstock the sweet cherry is grafted. Practice shows that cherry rootstocks have weak anchoring, and an already mature tree can break at the fusion point. The best rootstocks are Izmailovsky and Muscovy cerapadus (cherry and bird cherry hybrids), VTs-13 and VTs-52 (cherry and cerapadus hybrid).

Choosing a "pet", you need to immediately wrap its roots with a moistened cloth, put in a bag and tie. In this state, the seedling can be transported to the site without fear that the root system will dry out.

Sweet cherry is a light-demanding culture, and you need to choose a place for it that is sunny, protected from the wind. Drafts are destructive even for zoned "northerners". The soil on the site must be breathable and well-drained. Swampy or clayey dense soils, lowlands with stagnant spring melt waters are not suitable for cherries. The subsoil water horizon must lie at a depth of at least 2 meters.

In cold regions, cherries can only be planted in spring. This means that the preparation of the seat should be taken care of in the fall:

• dig a hole 1 meter in diameter and 80 cm deep;
• fill it with four buckets of humus, pouring it with a mound.

The purchased seedling can be held for some time without planting in a permanent place, if you lay it down and sprinkle the roots with earth. And yet it is better not to pull for a long time, but immediately place it in the landing pit.

Sweet cherries, like most fruit crops, are very convenient to plant "on a cone". The algorithm of actions is as follows:

1. Install a support stake on a humus mound (cone) poured at the bottom of the planting pit.
2. Place the seedling on the top of the mound and spread the roots so that they evenly descend along its slopes.
3. Fill the hole with good soil mixed with humus and tamp the hole a little.
4. Check the position of the neck... It should be just above the surface.
5. Tie the seedling to the support.
6. Make a groove around the circumference of the planting hole and water the seedling well along this furrow.
7. Mulch the trunk circle with organic mulch.

If the seedling was purchased in a container, the transplanting process is simplified. A hole 20 cm wider and deeper than the volume of the container is enough. The plant is placed in it together with an earthen lump and covered with a mixture of earth and humus.

Correct care

The trunk circle will require care throughout the life of the plant.It should be moist, loosened, weed-free and mulched. It is good to plant marigolds around the circumference. These flowers attract ladybugs - natural enemies of aphids, which love to perch on young shoots of sweet cherry trees.

Immediately after planting, the cherries must be formed. The first step is to examine the crown. If there is no clear “leader” among the shoots, it must be “appointed”: choose a good top one, pull it up to the support, giving it an upright position, and tie it up. The rest of the shoots are the future skeletal branches of the cherry. They should be shortened by the lower kidney to a length of 25 cm.

In the first year after planting, young cherries only need to be watered. In the fall, for better preparation of the plant for wintering, you can set a superphosphate top dressing (2 tablespoons per 1 square meter of crown projection). The Iput variety tolerates frosts well, but at a young age it is better to arrange additional protection for it.

In this quality, non-woven covering materials show themselves well. Before the onset of frost, a frame is installed around the seedling and covered in several layers with agrospan or spunbond 60 g / sq. m.

In the second year, cherries will need spring nitrogen feeding. It is better to use good manure humus, then there is no risk of overfeeding the plant.

You also need to continue forming the crown. There are different opinions about pruning cherries. For example, the famous pomologist Lev Platonovich Simirenko believed that pruning is contraindicated in this culture. Cherry has a low shoot-forming ability, and its crown itself is formed sparse. Even in mature trees, sanitary pruning and simple embossing of shoots directed into the crown can often be dispensed with.

Nevertheless, in order to stimulate the entry into fruiting and better yield, it is necessary to accustom the skeletal branches of the cherry to the correct position from a young age. The following rule applies here: the greater the angle between the shoot and the trunk, the better the yield. To ensure this condition, in the old days, bast shoes were hung on the branches of young seedlings. Now you can apply the method of bending the shoots:

1. In the spring, a free twine loop is attached to the side branch, closer to the top.
2. The other end of the twine is tied to a peg in the ground so that the branch forms a straight or even obtuse angle with the trunk.
3. The plant spends the whole summer in this "crucified" position. The loop can be cut in autumn.

In the middle of summer, year-on-year growths are examined on a cherry tree. Sweet cherries are capable of driving them up to 60 cm long and more per season. This is not very good - long growths do not have time to ripen before winter. Therefore, they should be pinched. Among other things, this procedure stimulates the branching of cherries.

To keep the tree compact, you need to keep track of the height of the center conductor. A leader's height of three meters will be sufficient. When it grows to this mark, it is cut off with transfer to the nearest skeletal branch.

3 facts about cherry pollination

Sweet cherry is a cross-pollinated plant. Even in partially self-fertile varieties, the yield is greatly increased if other cherries are planted nearby. But this does not mean at all that your entire plot needs to be turned into a cherry orchard. You can get by with minimal costs.

1. Sweet cherry is perfectly pollinated by its "sister" cherry. Thanks to this property, hybrids of these crops appeared - dukes. Therefore, if there is already a cherry tree in the garden with an early ripening period, you do not need to plant another cherry tree next to Iput. As a pollinator for her, for example, a cherry of the Turgenevskaya variety can fit.
2. Option for even more economical use of garden space - grafting of the donor material of the pollinator variety into the cherry crown Iput.Thus, you can get two different varieties on one trunk, which will pollinate each other.
3. If there is a suitable cherry or sweet cherry in the neighboring garden, you can completely do without your own pollinator. The main thing is to take into account two points:

• plant your cherries no further than 30 meters from a neighboring tree;
• make sure that a pear or apple tree does not grow between them, which can interfere with cross-pollination.

Diseases and pests

The scourge of stone fruits is fungal infections. Fortunately, Iput almost never suffers from either moniliosis or coccomycosis. If, nevertheless, the infection has occurred, you need to do the following:

1. Remove and burn affected shoots as soon as possible.
2. Treat the diseased plant with Horus. It is an extended spectrum fungicide. For better adhesion to the surface, you can dissolve it not in plain water, but with the addition of laundry or tar soap.

Aphids, which often attack cherries, have already been mentioned. It is possible to fight it with chemical preparations such as "Iskra", but at the same time one must remember: insecticides kill not only pests, but also beneficial insects - bees, ladybirds, lacewings. Having noticed aphids on your tree, it is better to deal with it with a simple ash and soap solution.

Harvesting and storage

During the pouring of fruits, cherries must be protected from starlings. These wonderful friends of gardeners can become lively competitors for a while, and in order not to be left without a crop, it is better to throw a protective net over the tree in time.

Mass harvesting of Iput cherries can be started when the fruits acquire a dark red color. It is important to monitor the condition of the stalks: if they begin to dry out, time is lost, and the cherries are overripe. Such fruits will have to be processed or eaten immediately.

Remove cherries from the branches carefully. Do not throw, but put the fruit in a container. Set aside damaged ones with cracked skin separately.

It will not work to keep Iput fresh for a long time - like any cherry, it quickly loses its taste and becomes watery. You can keep it in the refrigerator for 5 days, but then it is better to freeze it or make preparations for the winter. A jar of fragrant jam on a winter evening will remind you of the beautiful wanderer who has come a long way from “Greeks” to “Varangians”.

And finally, a short video describing cherries, including the Drozdovsky variety: