Sweet Cherries

It’s raining again this morning. When we have sweet cherries to pick rain is a real problem. The high sugar content in the cherry draws water through the skin and the cherry splits. Usually the splits are on the top around the stem or on the bottom where the drip hangs. New research on growing sweets in tunnels shows that they have a splitting problem there too. Apparently the water coming from the roots can split them too. Betsy and I toured all of our remaining sweets last night and there are lots of splits. There are still lots of good cherries and now they are big and very sweet. The Ulsters are firm too. The u-pick customer will have to spend a lot more time sorting out the split cherries, but the quality of the end product is awesome. I don’t get tired of eating sweet cherries. We had the picking crew pick without sorting this year so that when the picking was good we wold cover more ground. Then we had a sorting crew pulling out the bad ones. Today since it is raining the pickers are in here doing the sorting.

The rain will help to size the tart crop which we haven’t started yet. Because the national tart crop is very large we are considering leaving most of ours hang till the end and then having them concentrated into cherry juice instead of having them pitted and frozen. In a very large crop year the returns could be close to the same and then we would be assured that we have adequate tart cherry juice concentrate supplies for the coming months. The challenge here is that you must make your choices right now and then live with the results until next year.