The Black Flies and the Cherry Tree

Last year our cherry tree took a serious beating from a colony of ants that decided to farm black fly on its branches.  They seemed to appear out of the blue and there were suddenly thousands of black flies clinging to the under side of the cherry leaves.  I'm not sure if it's the ants or the flies that then make the leaves go curly so as to hide them from predators, but it might explain why I didn't spot them immediately.   Either way, the black flies were sucking the cherry dry .  I didn't  know how to get rid of them apart from picking off the leaves but the ants just brought more back, all the while collecting the sweet stuff that the flies exude from their rear ends.  Eventually I put the  whole tree into a basin odf water for about two weeks and that seemed to do the trick.  However the cherry tree was now seriously deformed.  It's surprising how much damage some tiny little flies can do to a tree.  But it was just a couple of years old and it was in a pot that was definitely too small.  All the effected branches ended up staying really stumpy and barely grew at all.

The cherry tree is now seriously lopsided but I hope that over time I can sort it out with some clever pruning. You can see from the picture that ther is one nice and healthy branch on the left sticking straight on and a nice healthy stem going upwards, but all the other branches are very small.  Overall the cherry didn't grow very much last year :(

Over the winter I re-potted the cherry into a nice big pot with plenty of manure and I've been watching it carefully ever since.  But guess what, those clever ants managed to hide their farm again and a few days ago Chris suddenly spotted them, running up and down the branches and then we uncovered a few pockets of black flies.  Luckily there weren't quite as many as last time and also it is much earlier in the season so we knew that if we took action quickly the cherry would probably be fine. 

So we made another trusty moat.  There are two large trays of water with some bricks put into them.  The cherry stands on the bricks and is not in contact with the sides of the trays containing the water.  The idea is that the ants either aren't able to or are not inclined to cross the water,although I'm half expecting to come out one morning only to see a few hundred of them hanging onto each other for dear life as the try to make a live bridge. 

So for the moment we're hoping that the ants' nest isn't within the pot itself and that the cherry will thrive from now on.

There is at l east one fruit developing and I'll be doing my utmost to make sure that we actually get to taste our first ever home grow cherry.....mmmmmmmm