The problem of labor is a most vexatious one under present conditions, it being impossible to obtain casual men laborers for cherry-picking and women and children are unsatisfactory, since the fruit must be carefully picked or both cherries and trees suffer. The problem is solved, unsatisfactorily in most cases, in various ways by different growers. Most of the crop is now picked by children in the teens under the eyes of men or women supervisors. In picking for the market the stem is left on and only the stem is touched by the fingers. Cherries for canning factories are less laboriously picked. The picking package is usually an eight-pound basket. The rate paid is one cent per pound. Pickers earn $1.50 to $2.00 per day in good seasons. Close watch is kept on pickers to prevent the breaking off of fruit-spurs, thereby destroying the succeeding year's crop, varieties fruiting in clusters suffering especially from carelessness in this respect. Cherries are picked a few days before full ripeness.
Cherries are sent to canneries in various packages but chiefly in half-bushel baskets or paper-lined bushel crates, the container being often supplied by the cannery. The six- and eight-pound baskets are the favored receptacles for Sour Cherries in city markets but the Sweet sorts are rather oftener sent in four-pound baskets and still more frequently in quart boxes. In the larger packages not much effort is made to make the fruit attractive but in the smaller ones, stemless and bruised cherries are thrown out and the package filled, stem down, with the best fruits. In fancy grades all of the fruit in the box is layered. The demands of the market, of course, determine the package and the manner of packing. Cherries are seldom stored longer than a few days at most in common storage and a week or two weeks in cold storage.
There is a marked difference in the shipping and keeping qualities of varieties of cherries, the sorts that keep longest and ship best, quite at the expense of quality, having the call of the markets. Undoubtedly this must remain so, though it is to be desired that local markets, at least, be supplied with the best, irrespective of handling qualities. A further factor that prevents the placing of choicely good cherries in distant markets at all times is brown-rot, to be discussed later, which more often attacks the juicy and usually the best-flavored varieties, oftentimes ruining the pack on the way to market—one of the most discouraging events incidental to cherry-growing.
Marketing machinery for cherries is at present very costly, inadequate and frequently sadly out of gear. The fruit passes first from the grower to a local buyer who ships to a center of consumption, transportation companies taking heavy toll on the way. Jobbers or commission companies, who in some cases receive the fruit direct from the grower, then distribute the crop to retailers in the consuming centers. Lastly, the retailer parcels out the quantities and the qualities demanded by the housewife. The whole business of selling the crop is speculative and the grower is fortunate to receive half of what the consumer pays and not infrequently has all of his pains for nothing or may even be forced to dip into his pocket for transportation. The perishableness of the product and the present defects of distribution go far to make the crop the hazardous one it is but all look forward to better times coming under an improved system of marketing.
Up to the present, it must be said, but little effort has been made in New York to ship far and to develop a trade in cherries other than at the canneries. The canners have until the last year or two taken the cream of the crop but with recent greatly increased plantings are now over-supplied. The average grower, possessing a mixture of mental inertia and business caution, has not sought other sources for the surplus fruit. Bolder and more energetic spirits are now developing new markets and opening up those to which other tree-fruits more generally go so that the present over-production may prove a blessing in disguise. The greatly increased demand, for Sour Cherries in particular, brought about by the development of markets in 1913-14, are most hopeful signs for the future of the cherry industry.
CHERRY DISEASES
Cherries, without preventive or remedial intervention, are at the mercy of two or three fungus diseases and sometimes several others are virulent, depending upon locality, season, weather and variety. One of these diseases, brown-rot, in spite of the great advances in plant pathology of recent years, is almost beyond the control of preventive or remedial measures. Happily, all the others yield better to treatment.
Brown-rot[55] (Sclerotinia fructigena (Persoon) Schroeter), sometimes known as fruit-mold or ripe-rot, very frequently attacks flowers and shoots but is most conspicuous on the ripe or ripening cherries where its presence is quickly detected by a dark discoloration of the skin which is afterwards partly or wholly covered with pustule-like aggregations of gray spores. The decayed fruits usually fall to the ground but sometimes hang to the tree, becoming shriveled mummies, each mummy being a storehouse of fungus threads and spores from which infestation spreads to the next crop. The disease, in some seasons, like a withering blight, attacks twigs, flowers and leaves early in the spring doing great damage to the young growth and often wholly preventing the setting of fruit. The rot spreads with surprising rapidity on the fruits in warm, damp weather either before the fruit is picked or in baskets while being shipped or stored. Preventive remedies have so far met with but indifferent success; probably the best method of control is to destroy the mummy-like fruits and all other sources of infection either by picking them from the trees, or much better by plowing them under deeply. Varieties of cherries show various degrees of susceptibility to brown-rot. All Sweet Cherries are more subject to the disease than the Sour sorts. But with either of the two species there are great variations in the susceptibility of the varietal hosts—a matter specially noted in a later chapter in the discussion of varieties.
Another serious disease of the cherry, and probably the most striking one in appearance, is the black-knot[56] (Plowrightia morbosa (Schweinitz) Saccardo), characterized by wart-like excrescences on shoots and branches. Black-knot looks more like the work of an insect than a fungus and was long supposed to be such even by those who were studying the trouble. The knots begin to form early in the summer and are of characteristic color and texture—dark green, soft and velvety, but in the fall, as the fungus ripens, the color changes to coal-black and the knots become hard and more or less brittle. The excrescences usually form on one side of a twig or branch so that death seldom follows quickly. The disease attacks both wild and cultivated plants in every part of this continent where cherries are grown but is epidemic only in the East, the cherry regions of the West being practically free from the disease. Up to the present time the fungus has not been found elsewhere than in America. Happily, black-knot may be controlled by cutting out the diseased wood. To completely eradicate the fungus, if it is especially virulent, however, the orchard must be gone over several times during a season. In New York the removal of black-knot is ordered by law, the results showing that when the law is obeyed, especially if there be hearty co-operation among growers, eradication is usually possible. Sweet Cherries are much less attacked by black-knot than the Sour sorts but the differences in immunity between varieties in either of the two species are not very marked—at least such is the case on the grounds of this Station where the disease is always present and is often very prevalent.
Exoascus cerasi Fuckel[57] is the cause of a very striking deformity of the cherry in Europe, both Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus being attacked. The disease has been reported in America but has not yet become virulent. The fungus attacks the branches, causing a clustering of the twigs in the form of a broom, giving it the name witches' broom. The leaves on the diseased twigs usually take on a crinkled shape and a reddish color. The malady may be readily prevented by the destruction of affected branches.