You want heart-shaped fruits that taste like wine with a deep, wine-like flavor. You want an early-ripening variety that are easy to get in summer and a tree whose summer canopy is covered with dark fruit. This is the Black Tartarian cherry.
Here’s the catch: That’s what most first-year gardeners find when they plant one. In spring, your tree blooms just fine; but come June, there is no cherries. There are just bare branches. It’s not because of bad soil or any kind of illness: it’s typically just the biology of how cherries get pollinated.
Why Your Black Tartarian Tree Has No Cherries
Black Tartarian happens to be self-sterile, meaning it can’t pollinate itself with its own pollen. It requires another sweet cherry variety (one that blooms at the same time) for bridging the distance and furnishing compatible pollen from a nearby tree. An infographic chart explain which ones will and won’t work together.
The best partners for Black Tartarian is Bing, Rainier, Stella, and Lapins. Because all bloom in that middle period (midseason), those are the ones in the good compatibility group, meaning the bees will be able to transport pollen from one to the other well. Of those four, choose one if you’re limited to just another tree.
That old sour cherry tree down the road won’t do; sour cherries and sweet cherries don’t play nice on a biological level. Sweet cherries is Prunus avium and sour ones are Prunus cerasus. Planting next to each other won’t improve your fruit set rate.
Pollination success depend a lot on timing. If your variety of choice works with another’s, then their bloom times need to happen at the same time for at least several days. If one tree flowers two weeks earlier than Black Tartarian, say, there will be no pollen for bees to transport. Sweetheart is considered risky; it blooms too late. Early Burlat does not fare well on compatibility lists either: It blooms too early. The chart point out the timing problems so you don’t plant things that sound great but won’t fertilize each other.
Then there’s distance: Pollen has to travel some distance as well. While bees are efficient, distance matter more than most people realize. And if your pollinator is two hundred feet away, for instance, will you get enough pollen into Black Tartarian before those flowers close? Ideally, keep compatible trees between fifty to one hundred feet apart.
Or try boosting your bee numbers rather than just hoping for wild foragers. Honeybees will stay in their hive during cool or windy weather; mason bees is good at working then, too, and are also efficient pollinators. Try setting up a mason bee house around the time buds begin breaking open, earlier in the season, and you’ll have better fruit set.
After that it’s mainly a matter of letting things happen: Pollinated flowers swell into tiny green fruits that turn yellow, then red and finally dark purple-black, taking another couple of months. Often nature thins out the crop by dropping some small fruitlets early, typically because it wants the ones left behind to be even sweeter and larger. It’s a kind of naturaly regulation on the part of the tree.
Growing Black Tartarian takes not only gardening knowledge but also some patience. It’s not just about planting a solitary tree and making a hole, it’s about creating a system. When you grow a tree like this, which depends off the change to its community, you plan differently: You don’t isolate a variety; you create a little neighborhood of ones that get along.
The distinction is between looking at bare branches versus eating dark, juicy fruit come summer. It should of been a more simple process.