cherry trees

thinking about plans for the new year/new decade
cherry trees I planted four years ago are thriving and produced first crop last spring with no problems except the two trees are both pie cherries, much too sour for my taste. I let the birds have their way with them last spring but this year they will get canned or cooked into some sweet treats.  so I went googling to source more trees and found this
https://www.vanwell.net/cherries
I'm thinking of maybe a 50 tree orchard, buying 100 trees, 10 each of 10 varieties and potting half of them to sell and offset the cost.
I found that not only are there many more varieties than I ever knew about but they are offered on different root stocks
I love cherries and they seem to grow very well here and I didn't have to worry about preventing bugs from destroying crop and I can feed lots of birds at the same time.
does anyone have experience with different root stocks and varieties in high clay content soil.

Sweet cherries are pretty different.  All cherries may do well there, but the fact that pie cherries do well doesn’t indicate that sweet cherries will. A lot depends on the rootstock though. Is anybody growing sweet cherries in your area? Nobody grows sweet cherries here because they don’t do well here. I have tried to or three. They didn’t live a year. I’m not sure why, but I think our soil may have too much clay. Pie cherries grow great here with no care.  I have a Montmorency Cherry and like them right of the tree or in pies. If you let them get dark red, they are fairly sweet.

It would take a lot of labor to pick the cherries from 50 trees. You might also overwhelm the market for them, unless you can sell to a distributor.
If you planted other types of fruit, you could have different harvest times.  More than one type of fruit would reduce or risk. You could have a terrible year for cherries and a great year for apples.

What state are you in?

Have you heard about the new bush cherries 4’ to 12’ tall? They are pie cherries, but some are as sweet as sweet cherries. Some suppliers call them Romance cherries because of the variety names.  I have three varieties but they are less than a year old.

http://www.honeyberryusa.com/honeyberry-plants-2.html This is a good company. I bought some very healthy honey berry plants from them.

http://www.bylands.com/blog-entry/plant-week-june-14-2012-romance-series-cherries

I don’t remember where I bought mine,  but that supplier said just 4’ to 6’ tall. I hope the small size is right. I didn’t give them much room.

Oops! I forgot that I decided on the Elwyn Meader series for their small size instead of the Romance series. The Romance series sounds sweeter. Meader’s cherries ripen in the late summer which does spread the harvest time out.

https://onegreenworld.com/product/joy-bush-cherry/

Ken W Wilson wrote:Have you heard about the new bush cherries 4’ to 12’ tall? They are pie cherries, but some are as sweet as sweet cherries. Some suppliers call them Romance cherries because of the variety names.  I have three varieties but they are less than a year old.

http://www.honeyberryusa.com/honeyberry-plants-2.html This is a good company. I bought some very healthy honey berry plants from them.

http://www.bylands.com/blog-entry/plant-week-june-14-2012-romance-series-cherries

I don’t remember where I bought mine,  but that supplier said just 4’ to 6’ tall. I hope the small size is right. I didn’t give them much room.

Curious how these are on disease resistance... especially to black knot as we have a lot of wild black cherry in my area that carries it. Makes me hesitate to plant other cherries or sadly plums. I'm thinking of trying damson though as it's listed as moderately resistant and I love damson jam.

I'm at edge of smokies in tn.
I don't think 50 trees is too many, I still have lots of space after putting in 500 chestnut trees and 25 each of six other nuts and native fruits, and half dozen peach trees, still have room for blueberries, grapes, apples, and some other fruits. Its a multi year process to prepare the spaces, buy what I want to plant and quite a bit of labor in planting. I have no intention of ever doing annual row crops in a big way ever again but planting trees and bushes that produce a crop every year is much more attractive to me.
20 something years ago I tended 250 peaches and 250 apples and after third farmers market each summer week I wished I had more trees in the ground.
I'm of the opinion that planting too much can't be a bad thing it just offers more options in the future when they mature, plus I have no intention to spray any chemicals, so bugs will surely get something to eat as well as wildlife. In fact I had an ag agent once tell me to plant twice as much as what your really after because there is no way to control all the wildlife from getting your fruit crops.
anyway the dwarf varieties that are 1/2 to 2/3 normal size are very attractive.