We offer some of their hardiest sweet cherries out there. If you aren't familiar with Montana fruit production, you may be surprised to hear that Montana boasts a small, but dedicated cooperative of sweet cherry growers around the Flathead Lake, a lake in NW Montana that is the largest freshwater Lake west of the Mississippi. With roughly 850 acres in production across nearly 200 farms, the warm Flathead Lake creates an ideal microclimate that buffers the surrounding area from some of Montana's harsh mid-winter extreme cold swings. Further, this Lake not only dissipates heat from around the Lake to the surrounding area during the Fall, at which point Montana can be particularly susceptible to intense early Fall flash frosts (-10F to -20F on October 25th 2020!) thereby protecting the trees, but the lake also acts as a cold sink by allowing cold air to emmanate from the chilly, frozen lake late Spring and "trick" the trees' blossom buds from emerging thereby avoiding late Spring frost risk.

So although you may say "What business does a nursery in Montana have growing so many sweet cherries?". The answer is that many of the sweet cherry trees we grow go to Flathead Sweet Cherry growers. Further, this has afforded us to trial many other varieties of sweet cherries in some of the warmer valleys west of the divide. For instance, 'Gold' sweet cherry takes the cake in our experience as the most cold hardy sweet cherry. It has survived near -40F without experiencing any winter kill. Granted this was only for a few hours during mid winter when the trees were fully hardened off but this is still impressive to say the least. Other sources note Black Gold and White Gold as being very hardy. In our experience, although these may be hardier than say 'Bing', the best performing sweet cherry variety for overwintering without any winter kill from sub -30F temperatures is 'Lapins'. 'Lapins' also happens to be one of our favorite in terms of flavor and is easily the most widely grown sweet cherry around Flathead Lake, having displaced the less hardy 'Bing' after an intensely cold '88-'89 winter.