Health benefits of tart cherries and how to grow the fruit in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY —What’s not to like about tart cherries? People use them in desserts, some turn them into maraschino cherries and the fruit even has some potential health benefits as a plus to their sweet flavor. And, tart cherries are easy to grow in Utah. You just can’t go wrong with tart cherries.

KSL Greenhouse Show hosts Maria Shilaos and Taun Beddes talked about all the benefits of eating tart cherries on Saturday, including how to grow the fruit in Utah.

KSL NewsRadio edited the following transcript for brevity.

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Health benefits

SHILAOS: “You were telling me some interesting things about tart cherries and their health benefits.”

BEDDES: “Tart cherries are one of our biggest local agronomic crops. The variety that’s usually grown by homeowners and commercially is called montmorency. It’s a French variety that’s been growing in the United States for a long time. There’s been a lot of university research on it and one of the big things to do with montmorency cherries is to juice it and then you can get juice concentrate, and there’s actual university studies out there showing that the juice is as effective as melatonin at getting you to fall asleep. But then, there’s also been a lot of evidence showing that the montmorency cherry will help, if you exercise, it helps you recover from a workout.”

Caring for a tart cherry tree

BEDDES: “Tart cherry trees grow very well in our soils. They are actually, of all of the cherry crops, the easiest as far as soil tolerance, to grow. They don’t tolerate swampy soil that well. When taking care of a tart cherry tree, you’re going to use open center pruning. You don’t need to take a lot of the branches off of them, you only prune about 20% of the branches out every year and if you have room, you can plant just a standard 20 by 20, but there’s lots of dwarf varieties out there.”

Listen👇 to the full podcast episode

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