Sweet cherry: Sweetheart

Sweetheart is a very productive and precocious sweet cherry cultivar that produces large, firm, dark red fruit. It’s cherries ripen relatively late in the cherry season, which is valued for extending the sweet cherry season. Due to it’s excellent qualities for both consumers and producers, Sweetheart received the ‘Outstanding Fruit Cultivar Award’ from the American Society for Horticultural Science in 2012.

Rootstock: Mazzard. Full-size, most popular cherry rootstock for centuries. Relatively tolerant of wet and heavy soils compared to other cherry rootstocks.

Disease resistance: Not known for any particular susceptibility or resistance to disease, but is resistant to rain cracking.

Parentage: Van x Newstar, released 1995. Developed by the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre at Summerland, B.C.

Pollination: Self-fertile, and an excellent pollenizer for other sweet cherries.

References:

Foundation Plant Services Prunus Encyclopedia entry on Sweetheart.

Specialty Produce article on Sweetheart. 

Article on Outstanding Fruit Cultivar Award. 

Kappel, F. et al. Sweet Cherry Improvement at Summerland, Canada. (2003). Acta horticulturae, 622, 607-610.