Protecting the Pelham cherry
Dave McDonnell’s first instinct was to break out his chainsaw when he laid eyes on two old cherry trees on his Ridgeville acreage after moving in last year.
On closer inspection, though, there was something he appreciated about their gnarly branches and craggy bark.
“They looked like old olive trees, and being a wine lover and having been to Europe, I left them,” McDonnell recalled.
It wasn’t long after granting the aged trees a stay of execution that McDonnell learned he’d made the right choice. The trees turned out to be an old variety of black sweet cherry called Pelham, and his neighbour, Tom Mathias, who’d been tending to them for years, pegged them to be at least 75 years old.
More importantly, though, they were two of last five Pelham cherry trees known to exist. McDonnell, a landscaper, switched from lumberjack to treehugger in a hurry.
“I all of a sudden wanted to put a fence around them to make sure no one cut them down or pruned them or damaged them,” he said. “I find it fascinating, this heritage tree. We (landscapers) never deal with fruit trees but I’m a history guy.”
So is Mathias, who operates a pick-your-own fruit orchard nearby. At one time, family farms in the neighbourhood planted large swaths of the Pelham cherry, processed at the local cannery operated by Mathias’s grandfather. But by the 1950s, new varieties of cherries usurped the Pelham as a prime processing cherhave ry, and it started to fade from the landscape, he explained.
“The drawback with these cherries is harvest is very short,” Mathias said. “They only have flavour in the last five or six days of ripening but they’re very disease-resistant and bug-resistant.”
That’s more than he can say about the sweet cherries in today’s orchards, including the red orbs he produces himself.
“A lot of new varieties they’ve developed are susceptible to disease so I’m spraying them more than the trees I grew up with,” Mathias said.
That’s also why he’s taken it upon himself to care for four of the five remaining Pelham cherry trees. The fifth belongs to another farmer who tends to it.
The Pelham cherry first surfaces in historical records in 1908 when it was planted in test blocks by the Horticultural Experiment Station in Jordan Harbour. At that time, the experiment station was testing 15 varieties of sweet cherries, which were then a profitable crop for growers.
There’s no sign of the Pelham in a 1914 catalogue of Ontario fruit varieties, however — the latest historical record to which I had access while writing this story. That could mean production hadn’t gone beyond those test blocks yet; a cherry tree can take up to seven years to produce its first full crop.
When ripe, a Pelham cherry is about three-quarters the size of sweet cherries on the market today, “pitch black” in colour, and boasts a deep, not overly sweet, cherry flavour, Mathias said.
Still, the Pelham cherry isn’t a sentimental relic for him or McDonnell. It underscores the importance of not writing off varieties that have fallen from favour in Niagara’s cherry industry.
“I’m confident we’re going to
to go back into these genetics,” Mathias said. “They’re always developing new varieties but most of those varieties are not as disease resistant with all their energy going into growing bigger, sweeter fruit.”
There are currently 10 varieties of sweet cherries grown commercially in Ontario, and mostly in Niagara. Just 15 years ago, there were closer to 20, noted Jayasankar Subramanian, a University of Guelph tree fruit breeder based in Vineland.
In that same time, cherry acreage
dwindled nearly 70 per cent, he added. High labour costs and unpredictable weather, including heavy rains at harvest that cause fruit to swell, crack and rot, make it hard to grow cherries in Niagara. Breeding new varieties beyond demonstration purposes isn’t a priority for the local tender fruit industry as a result. However, there’s still merit to Mathias’s and McDonnell’s preservation efforts, Subramanian said.
The Pelham cherry’s longevity, withstanding climate changes and disease in its lifetime, makes it a keeper despite the state of cherry farming in the region.
Even on the campus at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, where Subramanian keeps an office, there’s a a small sample of heritage cherries — though not the Pelham — to ensure the gene pool stays deep.
“It definitely has positive genetics,” he said. “You never know what’s going to happen in the future so it’s good to maintain them.”
Giving them exposure may help, too.
Excited by what was in his midst, McDonnell shared some of his crop with Daniel Hadida, co-chef at The Restaurant at Pearl Morissette, which is currently on En Route Magazine’s long list of Canada’s best new restaurants for 2018.
This year’s Pelham cherries were fleshy and tannic — more interesting than a typical sweet cherry, Hadida said. They wound up in several dishes, including alongside cured sockeye salmon, with sorrel, black locust flowers, fresh elder flowers and elder vinegar.
Hadida, who’s interested in finding heritage or unusual fruit trees, was keen to use the Pelham cherry because of his own convictions about maintaining biodiversity in farming.
Uncommon finds like the Pelham cherry also make cooking more interesting, especially when limiting oneself primarily to what’s available in Niagara, he explained.
“You want to go as deep into that as possible,” Hadida said. “It’s a more responsible way to be and you’re working with nature instead of trying to swing it in your direction.
“It’s encouraging diversity and that’s a good thing,” he added. “We’re not going to feed the world on Pelham cherries but we can do positive things in our own little area.”