Nanking Cherry 15 Seeds.

Nanking cherry

Excellent food and hedge plant with dense, disease-resistant foliage and masses of beautiful pink/white blossoms in spring. Nanking cherries can take drought, will grow in shade or sun and bear sweet, very juicy cherries that are excellent to eat fresh and to make into jams, compotes, preserves, pies, etc. Plant 2 Nanking cherries for cross pollination to get a full crop of fruit. Very hardy cherry for short season, northern climates in Zones 2-9 where temps can plunge to -40C. Fruit harvest in JULY. Small dense bush of HEIGHT: 5 -7 ft and WIDTH: 3

Nanking Cherry (Prunus tomentosa) is a wonderful, easy-care fast growing bush to add to the landscape. You'll love the fruit's sweet-tart taste for fresh eating or baking into pies.

The spring flowers are spectacular! Rosy pink buds cover the shrub in early spring, and open to showy white flowers. This reliable early bloomer is so welcome after the long winter.

The flowers are both fragrant and frost tolerant, which makes this plant a true harbinger of spring. Of course, the white blooms are also a welcome nectar source for butterflies and pollinators.

Nanking Cherry has a long history of proving delicious red fruit in harsh climates. The berries seem to glow against the attractive, textured foliage. Each cherry is a brilliant, translucent red jewel.

Use it as a long hedge along a fence or a single specimen. Or, create an orchard in a backyard homestead. This is the earliest Cherry to flower, and it produces an abundance of tasty cherries.

Nanking Cherry is not reliably self-fertile. To achieve fruit set, plant two or more shrubs close by each other (3-6 ft. apart) to ensure proper cross-pollination for the best fruit production.

Plan to start harvest as they ripen in early to mid-summer, depending on your location. Or, just leave them for your local bird population. It's a win-win either way!

We'll tempt you to harvest some for yourself, as many people swear by the Nanking for wine and mead production. Or, use it to craft beautiful clear jellies and wonderful jams. You'll find pages of recipes for Nanking Cherry on the Internet. It would take years just to try them all.

The highly-textured, quilted, dark green, toothed leaves are decorative in their own right. They are downy on the underside. The soft-textured foliage turns a soothing yellow in the fall.

Even the bark is beautiful, lustrous and ornamental. It delivers visual interest in winter as it exfoliates to show pattern variation of shiny reddish-brown bark peeling to orange as it ages .

Nanking cherry seeds collected from my garden summer 2023.

Grows as a small tree or large bush with bright red cherries (drupes). The have a sweet and tangy taste and are excellent to eat fresh.

Fully hardy to -40C. Zone 2-9

Quantity: 15 Seeds

Stratification Required: Warm stratify one month, followed by cold for 4-5 months. The easiest method is to plant outside in late summer.

Planting instructions: Our seeds are fresh to preserve viability. We recommend keeping them refrigerated for short term storage, and fall planting into prepared seed beds. Sow 1" deep and cover with mulch. Add squirrel and rodent protection like wire mesh or hardware cloth.

Nanking cherry seeds require cold stratification for two to three months for optimal germination because, in nature, the seeds have time in the ground over the winter to germinate.

There are several ways to replicate this at home:

Place the seed into a pot of wet sand, sphagnum peat moss, or vermiculite, checking the moisture level frequently.

Dampen a paper towel, seal it in a bag with the seeds, and keep it in the refrigerator for 100 days to mimic nature.

Plant the seeds outside in the fall and let nature achieve stratification. The problem with doing this is that moisture levels are hard to monitor, and rodents love to eat the seeds.