How to Plant Nanking Cherry: Two Seedlings, Drainage and Spacing

One bush on its own will flower and set almost nothing

Nanking cherry is self-incompatible. A single bush blooms heavily, covers itself in white and pink flowers, and then drops nearly all of them. What comes off it is a handful of fruit rather than the several pounds the same bush would carry with a partner. This is not a soil problem, a feeding problem or a young-plant problem, and no amount of patience fixes it.

The partner has to be a genetically different individual, which in practice means a second seedling rather than a second plant taken as a cutting or a division from the first. Nanking cherry is almost always grown from seed, so two plants bought separately are normally distinct and will pollinate each other. If you propagated your second plant from your first by cutting or layering, the two are clones and behave as one bush.

Plant two at minimum and three if you have the room. Bloom overlap between any two individuals is never total, and a third plant covers the days at either end of the window when a spring runs warm or cold. The two plants do not need to be adjacent, but keeping them within about 50 feet (15 m) of each other makes insect transfer reliable in the cold, still weather that this shrub flowers in.

Drainage decides whether the bush lives

Nanking cherry survives cold that kills almost every other fruiting shrub, down to around minus 40F (minus 40C), and it shrugs off dry summers and alkaline soil once its roots are down. What it will not survive is wet feet. Roots sitting in saturated soil for more than a few days in the growing season rot, and the bush answers by wilting on a hot afternoon, then leafing out thinly the following spring, then dying. More Nanking cherries are lost to heavy wet ground than to anything else.

So choose the site for drainage before you think about anything else. A slope, a raised bed or a mound of 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 cm) of soil built on top of a heavy clay layer all work. Full sun is the second requirement: this shrub tolerates part shade but flowers and fruits in proportion to the light it gets, and a bush in half a day of sun carries roughly half a crop.

The soil itself matters much less. Nanking cherry does well in sandy, gravelly and thin ground and tolerates a pH from around 6.0 to 8.0 without complaint. Do not dig peat, compost or fertilizer into the planting hole; a rich pocket in poor ground keeps roots circling inside it instead of spreading out into the surrounding soil, which is exactly what you do not want in a shrub whose drought tolerance depends on a wide root plate.

Putting the plants in

Plant while the bush is dormant, either in early spring as soon as the ground can be worked or in autumn about six weeks before the soil freezes. Bare-root plants must go in during dormancy. Container-grown stock can be planted through the season, but a summer planting needs watering every few days for its first two months and there is no advantage to it.

1. Dig wide, not deep Make the hole two to three times the width of the root ball and no deeper than the roots themselves. Break up the sides so they are rough rather than glazed. The bush must sit at the depth it grew at before, with the point where the roots flare out level with the surrounding ground or an inch (2.5 cm) proud of it.
2. Spread the roots out On bare-root stock, fan the roots across the bottom of the hole rather than folding them in. On a container plant, tease the outer roots free and cut through any that circle the pot. Roots left circling never straighten out and strangle the plant years later.
3. Backfill with the soil you dug out Use the native soil, not a bagged mix. Firm it with your hands as you go so there are no large air pockets, but do not tread it hard. Water in heavily as soon as the hole is filled to settle the soil around the roots.
4. Mulch, leaving the base clear Spread 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) of bark, wood chip or straw over the root zone out to the edge of the branches. Keep a clear gap of 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) around the stems; mulch piled against the bark holds moisture there and invites rot and borers.
5. Cut nothing at planting Do not head the plant back or shorten branches. Nanking cherry establishes fast and the whole point of it is early cropping, so every shoot you leave is potential fruiting wood in year two or three. The only cuts to make are on broken or dead stems.

Spacing: fruit bush, hedge or windbreak

A Nanking cherry left to grow reaches 6 to 8 feet (1.8 to 2.4 m) tall and roughly as wide, occasionally 10 feet (3 m) in a good site. It is a broad, twiggy, multi-stemmed shrub, not a tree, and it never needs staking or a central leader. Space according to what you want from it, because the spacing you choose is difficult to undo later.

For fruit, give each bush its full width. Crowded plants shade their own interior, the inner wood stops fruiting, and picking becomes a fight. For a hedge or a windbreak the plants are set deliberately close so they knit into a solid mass, and you accept a smaller crop per plant in exchange.

The first two years

Water a newly planted bush deeply once a week through its first growing season, and twice a week in a hot dry spell, soaking the whole root zone rather than sprinkling the surface. From the second year onward it needs water only in genuine drought. Keep a circle of about 3 feet (1 m) around the stems free of grass; turf competes hard for water and slows establishment more than any weed does.

Expect a few flowers in the first spring after planting and a token handful of fruit. The second spring usually gives a real, if small, crop, and by the third year the bush is carrying properly. That speed is the main argument for growing Nanking cherry at all: no other cherry gets you from planting to a bowl of fruit in three years.

Write down the date you planted each bush, its position in the garden, and which plant came from where. Nanking cherries are seedlings, so no two are alike in bloom timing, fruit size, color or flavor. Two or three seasons of notes tell you which of your plants is worth propagating and which one is only there as a pollen partner.