Gadenin日本語Get the appRipeness: color, then a few more days
Fruit is ready roughly 55 to 65 days after full bloom, which puts harvest in early summer, well ahead of most tree cherries. The berries are small, about half an inch (12 mm) across, and they color through pink to a bright translucent scarlet. Some seedlings ripen to a deep red and a few to white or pale yellow; color varies from plant to plant, which is one reason to know your own bushes rather than follow a general description.
Full color is a signal to start tasting, not to start picking. For three or four days after the berries finish reddening the flesh is still sharp and the skin still firm. Ripe fruit is slightly soft under the finger, glossy, and gives a sweet-tart flavor with a clean cherry character rather than the pure acid you get a few days earlier. Give it those extra days and the crop is transformed.
The window is short. From properly ripe to over-ripe is about a week in cool weather and as little as three or four days in a hot spell. Over-ripe fruit goes dull, dents under a fingertip, ferments on the bush and attracts wasps. Because the berries hang in dense clusters along the stems, a bush goes from tempting to spoiled quickly, so plan to pick it over two or three times a few days apart rather than waiting for the last cluster.
| Stage | Look | Feel | Taste | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sizing up | Green to pale pink | Hard | Bitter | Get the netting on now |
| Coloring | Patchy pink to red | Firm | Sharply acid | Wait, taste in 3 days |
| Ripe | Even bright red, glossy | Slight give | Sweet with tartness behind | Pick over the bush |
| Over-ripe | Dull red, wrinkling | Dents, skin splits | Flat, fermenting | Strip and use today or clear away |
How to pick fruit this soft
The berries sit tight against the stems on very short stalks, in clusters that can run the whole length of a shoot. That makes picking slower than it looks, and the skin is thin enough that rough handling turns a handful into juice. Work in the cool of the morning, when the fruit is firmest, and get the crop into the fridge immediately.
- Roll, do not pull Take each berry between finger and thumb and roll it gently sideways off the stalk. Ripe fruit releases with almost no pressure. If you have to tug, it is not ready, and pulling hard strips the spur that would have carried next year's fruit.
- Pick into shallow trays Use containers no more than 3 or 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) deep. Nanking cherries crush under their own weight, so anything at the bottom of a full bucket arrives in the kitchen as pulp. A single layer in a tray keeps the fruit intact.
- Try a sheet under the bush for the last pass On the final picking, spread a sheet or tarp under the branches and tap the stems firmly. Fully ripe fruit drops and under-ripe fruit stays on. It is quick, it self-selects for ripeness, and it clears the bush of the over-ripe berries that would otherwise rot in place.
- Do not wash until you use it Water on the skin accelerates the breakdown of an already fragile fruit. Refrigerate dry and rinse only at the moment you are going to cook, freeze or eat it.
One or two days, then it is gone
This is the defining limitation of the crop and the reason you will never see Nanking cherries in a shop. Picked fruit holds one to two days in the fridge in a shallow covered tray and then collapses. It does not travel, it does not sit on a counter, and a warm afternoon in a closed bag turns a picking into a fermenting mess. Grow it because you can pick it yourself; there is no other way to eat it.
So decide what you are doing with the crop before you start picking. The simplest answer is the freezer: spread the berries in a single layer on a tray, freeze solid, then bag them. They freeze loose, keep their flavor and go straight into cooking from frozen. The stones are small and easy enough to work around in a cooked preparation.
The classic uses are jelly, juice, syrup and sauce, because the fruit is high in acid and pectin and cooks down without needing anything added. Simmer with a little water, press through a sieve or a jelly bag to remove the stones and skins, and go on from there. Eaten fresh out of hand a fully ripe berry is genuinely good, though the stone-to-flesh ratio means most of a crop ends up cooked.
How much to expect, and what to record
A bush gives its first token handful of fruit in the second year after planting, a real if modest crop in the third, and comes into full bearing around the fifth or sixth. From then on expect somewhere between 5 and 15 pounds (2 to 7 kg) from a mature well-sited plant, and more from an exceptional one. Crops vary far more year to year than with most fruit, because everything depends on whether the very early flowers escaped frost.
That variability is why yields on this shrub are worth writing down. A poor year is usually explained by a single cold night at bloom, not by anything you did or failed to do, and having the record stops you chasing imaginary problems and rethinking a bush that is actually performing fine.
Record the date of full bloom, the date you first picked, and the weight from each bush separately. The gap between bloom and harvest is remarkably consistent for a given plant in a given garden, so after one or two seasons you can look at the flowers and know within a few days when to get the netting on and when to clear the freezer.