“Cherry Trees by Otto Hackenberg”

The following undated article was submitted for this family project by Eleanor Abraham, Rainier historian and member of the garden club, who had asked Otto to write about trees.  It is an interesting insight into the “multi-tasking” cherry tree in the family orchard that always mystified Josef’s grandchildren.*

“Cherry Trees by Otto Hackenberg”

“. . . On the farm where I was born dad had homesteaded in 1886, and government rules required a house to be built, a certain amount of land to be cleared, and a certain amount of fruit trees to be planted each year in order to hold on to the homestead.  The size of dad’s orchard that I can remember as far back as 1911, I am convinced that he planted, and in some cases grafted fruit trees on wild ones.

He had a larger orchard than the government required him to have.  By 1911 some of the cherry trees had grown quite large, the trunks were at least a foot or more in diameter and the trees over 20 feet high.

There were three large Black Republicans, one large May Duke.  The May Duke tree was usually loaded with cherries, but it was an early variety and the birds would start in on them as soon as they started to turn red, and the birds usually won out.  Those we got to eat were far from being ripe.  The same for Governor Wood, also an early cherry.  *Perhaps about in the year of 1900 two native wild choke cherries came up and dad had a Bing graft from somewhere, and he grafted one of the trees to Bing and the other to Royal Ann, both grew, and nearly always they both had a good crop of cherries.  Perhaps the two varieties were good for pollination for each other.  The trees were pruned so that they resembled one tree.

About 1912 a seedling cherry came up in the yard.  Dad told my older brother Bill to get a Bing graft, and graft the tree.  He did.  But some years later when the tree started to bear, it had Royal Anns on it.  Dad wrote him about it, and my brother wrote back, “If you want Bing cherries from that tree, pick them in a milk pan, and they will go Bing!”