Black Cherry

Black cherry leaves, twigs, bark and pits contain cyanogenic glycosides that release hydrogen cyanide when the tissue is damaged. The critical fact is that WILTING dramatically raises the risk: leaves on branches broken by wind, cut in pruning, browsed and left hanging, or frost-damaged are far more dangerous than leaves on an intact growing plant. Ruminants are most vulnerable because rumen conditions release the cyanide efficiently, and cattle, sheep and goats have died from a single feed of wilted cherry brush; horses are also at risk. Onset is fast - often within 15 to 60 minutes - and animals are frequently found dead with no observed illness. Black cherry is among the leading causes of plant-related livestock death in the eastern United States. For people the hazard is far smaller but real: it is the reason pits must be strained out of cooked fruit rather than ground into it.

Watch for: Wind-broken or storm-thrown branches lying inside a pasture, paddock or corral - by far the most common way this happens, because the canopy of a mature tree reaches a long way over a fence. Piles of fresh prunings or brush tossed over a fence line. A tree growing along a fence where animals can browse the lower branches. Foliage that has been frosted or drought-wilted while still within reach. In an affected animal: sudden distress, rapid labored breathing, staggering, collapse, and bright cherry-red mucous membranes and blood, progressing to death within an hour. Dead animals near a black cherry with no other explanation should be treated as a suspected cyanide case.

Prevent: Site the tree so this cannot happen, and judge the distance by where a 40-foot limb lands rather than by where the trunk stands. Never plant black cherry overhanging or adjacent to grazed ground, and fence stock well back from existing trees rather than relying on animals to avoid it. Gather every pruning and every wind-broken limb and dispose of them where no grazing animal can reach - burn or haul out, never dump over a fence. Walk fence lines after every windstorm through the growing season, which is the single most valuable habit if you keep animals. Do not turn hungry animals into an area with black cherry in it, since hunger is what makes them eat something they would normally leave. In the kitchen, cook fruit whole and strain the pits; never grind, blend or crush them.

Treat: There is no home treatment for a poisoned animal - cyanide poisoning moves too fast, and survival depends on a veterinarian giving specific antidotes within minutes. Call a veterinarian immediately, move the remaining animals off the area, and remove the source. The realistic response is entirely preventive: control where the tree grows relative to stock, and control where the cuttings go. For people, if pits have been crushed into a batch of juice or preserves, discard the batch rather than trying to judge how much is too much, and contact Poison Control if anyone has consumed a quantity of crushed pits.

This is the single most important thing to know about black cherry, and it is a siting decision rather than a maintenance one. The classic case is a summer storm dropping a limb into a paddock overnight. If you keep or border livestock, plant the tree somewhere else and walk your fence lines after every blow.

Japanese beetles are metallic green-and-copper beetles about half an inch long that emerge in early summer and feed for six to eight weeks. They feed in aggregating masses - one beetle's feeding releases a scent that draws in more - so a plant goes from untouched to covered in a couple of days. They chew the soft tissue between the leaf veins and leave the veins standing, so the leaf ends up as a brown lace skeleton, and they shred open flowers and sometimes ripening fruit as well. They work the sunniest upper parts of a plant on warm afternoons. The white C-shaped grubs spend the rest of the year in turf and pasture soil eating grass roots, and the adults then fly in from wherever they hatched, which can be some distance away.

Watch for: Clusters of shiny metallic beetles massed together on the upper, sunniest foliage and down inside open blooms, heaviest on warm sunny afternoons from around late June. Leaves reduced to lace, with the veins left intact and the tissue between them gone - unmistakable, and quite different from the ragged chewing of a caterpillar. Ragged, chewed petals and blooms that never open properly. Beetles that let go and drop straight to the ground when you disturb the plant. Feeding damage on ripening fruit, on the plants they also take fruit from. Whole branches going brown and lacy at the top of a plant while the shaded lower growth stays untouched.

Prevent: Hand-picking is genuinely the main defense in a home garden. Go out in the cool of the morning while the beetles are sluggish, hold a tub of soapy water underneath, and knock them in - they drop when disturbed, so most fall straight into it. Do it daily through the flight: because the beetles call each other in, taking them off early stops a plant becoming a beacon. Do not put pheromone or lure traps anywhere near the garden - they demonstrably pull in far more beetles than they catch. And do not count on lawn grub control: milky spore has performed poorly and inconsistently in field trials across most of the US, and treating your own turf does not reduce the adults feeding on your plants, because they fly in from surrounding properties. Where it is practical, row cover or netting through the peak flight excludes them outright. Otherwise riding out the six-to-eight-week wave is a legitimate strategy, since most established plants absorb the damage.

Treat: Persistent morning hand-picking into soapy water is the most effective home control there is, and on a vigorous established plant the damage is usually cosmetic and needs nothing else. Neem deters feeding rather than killing, and has to be reapplied. For heavy pressure, spinosad or a targeted insecticide labeled for the plant will work - but time any spray away from bloom and apply it at dusk to protect bees, and observe the pre-harvest interval on anything you eat. On flowering plants, some gardeners simply shear the blooms off for a couple of weeks and let the plant rebloom once the wave has passed, which removes the lure as well as the damage. Young plants and young trees are the ones worth defending: a mature tree or an established vine tolerates several weeks of leaf loss without lasting harm.

Black cherry is one of the beetles' most preferred trees, and the top of the canopy can go brown and lacy by mid-July. On an established tree it is cosmetic, and spraying a plant grown to feed hundreds of caterpillar species defeats the purpose of having it. Hand-pick on a young or small tree only.

Deer are the largest garden problem across much of the country, and where pressure is high they set the limit on what you can grow at all. They browse at night and around dawn and dusk, taking tender shoots, leaves, buds, flowers, and fruit within about five feet of the ground, and they come back night after night to anything they have found and liked. Because they have no upper incisors they tear rather than cut, leaving ragged stem ends - that is how you tell deer damage from a rabbit's clean angled cut. In fall, bucks rub their antlers on young trunks and can strip the bark right around a stem, which kills a young tree outright. Palatability varies enormously between plants and between seasons: a herd short of food in late winter eats things it ignores in June, and no plant is truly deer-proof.

Watch for: Growth cleanly missing overnight, with the plant browsed back to a level line about as high as a deer can comfortably reach. Ragged, torn stem ends rather than the clean angled cut a rabbit leaves - the single most reliable identifier. Buds and flowers gone while the foliage below is untouched, since deer often take the best part first. Hoof prints and droppings in soft ground near the damage. Repeat visits, with fresh damage each morning once a planting has been found. On young trees, shredded and stripped bark and broken low branches in autumn - that is antler rubbing rather than feeding.

Prevent: Fencing is the only thing that reliably works. Eight feet is the standard for excluding deer, or two parallel four-foot fences a few feet apart, which they will not jump because they cannot judge the landing. Short of that, cage individual plants: a sturdy wire cage or trunk guard around every young tree, left on until the trunk is thick and the canopy is above browse height, prevents both browsing and antler rubbing and is the single highest-value thing you can do for a young tree. Repellent sprays do help at moderate pressure, but they wash off and deer habituate, so reapply after rain and rotate between different types through the season. Motion-activated sprinklers, scent deterrents, and noise devices work for a while and then stop. Siting matters too: plants close to the house, in daily traffic, and screened behind other planting get browsed less than the same plant out at the boundary.

Treat: There is no chemical fix, only exclusion and recovery. Get physical protection up immediately after the first damage, because deer return to a known meal, and reinforce or rotate whatever you were relying on before. Most plants regrow from browsing if the crown and roots are intact - feed and water a grazed plant and protect the regrowth while it comes back. What does not recover in the same season is anything whose buds or flowers have been taken, and a young tree whose bark has been rubbed right around the trunk is usually lost. Where deer pressure is genuinely heavy, the honest answer is to fence properly or to grow the plants deer leave alone, rather than to keep replacing losses.

Deer browse black cherry heavily and are not harmed by it the way livestock are - wild deer handle the foliage routinely at the amounts they take. Cage or tube a young tree for its first several years, because browsing and autumn buck rub are the two things most likely to kill it before it gets above head height.

The signature disease of plums and cherries in the eastern US and Canada: a fungus (Apiosporina morbosa) that forms hard, black, crusty, warty swellings that encircle and girdle twigs and limbs, deforming and eventually killing branches. Left unchecked it takes over a tree over a few years.

Watch for: Olive-green, corky swellings on new growth that harden and turn coal-black and warty, encircling twigs and branches; worst on wood 1-2 years old.

Prevent: Cut out every knot 4-6 inches below the swelling during dormant winter pruning, sterilizing the saw between cuts and burning or bagging the wood; plant more-resistant varieties; and remove wild cherry and plum nearby, which harbor the disease.

Treat: Prune out and destroy all knots annually - this sanitation is the core control. Fungicide sprays from bud break through early shoot growth help in high-pressure orchards but don't replace cutting out the knots.

Black cherry is one of the wild hosts that orchard guidance means when it says to remove wild cherry from the vicinity. A big tree tolerates knots for years, but it seeds the disease into every cultivated cherry and plum nearby, so if you grow stone fruit, cut every knot out each winter or keep the two well apart.

Tent caterpillars build conspicuous silk tents in the branch forks of cherry, chokecherry, apple, plum and related trees in spring, and feed outward from them on the new leaves. Eggs are laid in a hard, shiny, dark band encircling a twig in summer and hatch just as the buds open the following spring, so the caterpillars arrive exactly when the foliage is softest. Colonies grow fast and a heavy year can strip a small tree completely by early summer. The damage looks alarming and is genuinely ugly, but a healthy established tree refoliates within a few weeks and suffers no lasting harm; repeated defoliation over several consecutive years is what weakens a plant. Populations run in multi-year cycles, so a bad spring is often followed by another and then by several quiet ones.

Watch for: Dense white silk tents in the crotches of branches from the moment the leaves open, growing larger week by week as the colony expands. Bare, stripped twigs radiating out from each tent while the rest of the tree still has leaves. Hairy caterpillars massed on the tent surface in the morning and evening and out feeding in between. Hard, shiny, dark egg bands wrapped around pencil-thick twigs, visible on bare wood all winter - the easiest time to find and remove them. Frass and shed skins accumulating below the tents.

Prevent: Look for the egg bands on bare twigs through the winter and prune or scrape them off - one band removed in February is a whole colony that never appears. Then check branch forks weekly from the moment the buds break, because a tent found small is trivially dealt with. Leave the birds, parasitic wasps, and predatory beetles alone; they take a heavy toll on tent caterpillars and are the reason outbreaks collapse on their own. Do not attempt to burn tents out of a tree - it does more damage to the tree than the caterpillars ever would.

Treat: Pull the tents out by hand in the early morning or evening while the caterpillars are inside, wearing gloves, and drop the whole mass into soapy water. On a small tree this alone is a complete solution. For a heavy infestation on a young plant, Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) applied to the foliage the caterpillars are feeding on works well and spares beneficial insects, but it only affects small caterpillars, so timing is early. On an established tree, doing nothing is a legitimate choice: it refoliates and moves on. Anything you spray must be labeled for the plant you are treating.

Black cherry is the primary host - the roadside trees draped in silk each spring are almost always this one. Two extras matter here. The stripped leaves the caterpillars drop are wilting cyanogenic foliage, so clear them out of grazed ground. And in horse country, tent caterpillars feeding on black cherry are the documented cause of mare reproductive loss syndrome; keep pregnant mares away from black cherry through an outbreak spring.

Birds find ripening fruit and seed before you do. Robins, waxwings, starlings, catbirds, jays, sparrows, finches, blackbirds, and doves all work a garden, and the pressure arrives in a narrow window - the last days before harvest, when sugar rises, color changes, and the crop softens or the grain hardens. A flock can strip a small planting in a day or two, and birds that only peck rather than take whole fruit still leave wounds that rot or draw wasps. Squirrels, chipmunks, and other wildlife usually turn up on the same crop at the same time. This is competition rather than disease: the birds are not harming the plant, and a big tree or a heavy-cropping bush often has enough for everyone - but on a small planting it can be the difference between a harvest and none.

Watch for: Fruit disappearing from the outermost, most exposed parts of the plant first, and from the top of a tree where you cannot reach anyway. Single neat pecks and gouges in ripening fruit, with several fruits sampled rather than one eaten through - the classic sign that it was birds rather than an animal. Heads of grain or seed going visibly lighter and emptier as they ripen, with hulls and chaff scattered underneath. Freshly sown seed vanishing off the surface of a bed before it germinates. Bird traffic in and out of the plant picking up as the crop colors, and birds waiting on nearby wires and branches. Wasps arriving at the pecked and split fruit shortly afterward.

Prevent: Net, and net early. Bird netting draped over a frame or hoops so it stands off the fruit, with the edges closed at ground level, is the only thing that reliably works at harvest scale - and it has to go on before the crop starts to color, because once birds have found the food they are far harder to displace. Keep fruit trees small enough that netting them is actually feasible; that decision gets made years earlier, at planting. Bags of mesh, organza, or paper slipped over individual heads, clusters, or prize fruit protect a small crop without netting the whole plant. Then shorten the exposure: pick promptly and completely rather than leaving ripe fruit hanging as a lure, clear split and dropped fruit that draws birds and wasps alike, and where a crop can finish off the plant, harvest a little early and ripen or dry it under cover. Rake in or cover broadcast seed so it is not lying in plain view.

Treat: There is no treatment once a crop is being taken - only protection and timing, so the answer is to get netting on and to pick what is ready. Reflective tape, flash ribbon, spinners, and decoy predators do work, but only for a few days at a time: birds habituate fast, so move and rotate them and never rely on them as the main defense for a crop you care about. Cut and gather grain or seed heads a little early, at firm dough, and finish drying them under cover instead of leaving them standing for the flocks. Plant a little extra, or a decoy crop the birds prefer, and accept sharing anything that crops heavily. On a wild or foraged patch, fruit going to birds and small mammals is the point of the plant rather than a problem to solve.

On a black cherry the birds are the point, not the problem - feeding robins, waxwings, thrushes and grosbeaks is half the reason to plant one, and netting a 60-foot tree is not a thing. Pick from the low branches and let the canopy go. The side effect is seedlings scattered across the neighborhood, which is a weeding job rather than a harvest one.