A very large cherry is growing in a overgrown/ for development lot close to me in Maple Ridge. The cherries are quite small, smaller than a marble but are bright red right now. I was told by a passerby they are inedible. Looking to find out what type of cherry it is and if it is edible. There are several smaller cherry trees growing around it and I would like to know if it is worth pulling one and growing it.
It's a cherry; you can taste them and decide for yourself if you like them. Pie cherries are sour but pleasant. It's a bit tricky though if you don't know if they're meant to be dark or if they're ripe at this colour, so you might have to keep trying them. There are a lot of cherries around that started as rootstocks of ornamental trees; I think these leaves look similar to Prunus avium, so that could be the case here. I don't think they would be nice and sweet like the cultivars we like to eat nor pleasantly tart like pie cherries. In that sense, they're inedible, but they're not dangerous to try eating.
Seedling sweet cherry trees (Prunus avium, as pointed out by wcutler) are very common in this area. If that's what it is, then the resulting cherries are unpredictable. They may be tasty, but usually they're not very good and are almost never as sweet as the parent tree(s). At least they should be edible.
thank-you for the replies! I will try to grow one of the seedlings for curiosity, as we are moving to a large acreage on Vancouver Island and I would like to have lots of trees of different types. Are there any fruit trees that are more predictable (i.e. produce fruit close in nature to the mother tree) when grown from seed?
There are no commercial fruit varieties that i can think of that will give a predictable outcome from seed propogation. You just dont know nor can you control the type of pollination it receives from pollinators in the wild. Theoretically you could take five apple seeds from the same tree and grow five different trees. Your best bet to replicate your favourite varieties is threw cuttings and grafting. Hope this helps and have fun at your new acreage!