Question: What’s the most nutrient-dense part of a cherry tree?

Answer: The cherry’s pit. 

As Mike Omeg of Orchard View Cherries noted in an AEA webinar, “the cherries . . .  concentrate the nutrients that they have available into the pits. And the trees will actually sacrifice their canopy growth and root growth in order to take the nutrients they would need for that and concentrate them into the pits. If you think about how many pits are in eight tons of cherries [harvested per acre], it’s a substantial pile of pits that we’re taking off.” 

And there are a whole lot of nutrients in those pits. 

Of course, this applies to all crops: since a plant orients itself towards successful reproduction, it makes sure to pack nutrients into its seed. This is why for most crops—like corn, wheat, or beans—the seed is the part we eat. 

But with fruit—like cherries—we generally consider the seeds to be a nuisance. In developing a nutritional management perspective, it may be useful to reframe our thinking, and focus our attention on those seemingly useless pits. Our goal should be to make sure the tree has abundant nutrition so that there is plenty left over after developing the pits–for the leaves, shoots, roots, and especially the buds.

Omeg notes that with the removal of the pits at harvest, the tree loses a huge amount of its overall nutrients, and that it’s imperative for the health of the tree to replace them right away. “If we don’t do anything to replace those nutrients for the tree—and the soil biology that’s generating the nutrients for the tree—until the next spring, then that means our tree has to just bump along for a third of the growing season or maybe more, without having those nutrients available to them.”

Post-harvest applications of nutrients are critical to replacing the nutrients that the tree has pumped into its seeds, and that it loses at harvest time.