Managing a short crop

I have been riding through the sweet cherries this afternoon trying to get together a plan to manage u-pick. The crop is very short. The early May frost damaged almost all of the blossoms in the larger sweet cherry block that slopes to the West. There are a few black sweets (Cavaliers) that survived but 95% of the trees in this block have no fruit at all. The light sweet cherries in this block also froze out. The second sweet cherry block is North of the farm house and slopes to the East. This block came through the frost in much better shape. While the trees in the lowest rows are pretty bare there is a good crop of dark sweets (Ulsters) and some light sweets in trees that are higher up the hill. Along with the reduced crop we have recorded rain on 15 of the last 24 days. As sweet cherries ripen, rain can cause cracking, and there are are a great many cracks in the cherries we do have.
We are also dealing with a crop that is two weeks ahead of normal. This means that many customers will be looking to pick after we have already finished. We are putting out the word right now that U-pick is open until the cherries are gone, but that could be in 10-14 days. I wish we could notify all of the customers about the early crop, but because the crop is so small we will run out anyway and so some customers will not be able to pick. We do have sweets on a leased farm South of Elk Rapids and we will be picking those to sell in the market and we hope to have cherries in the stand for people who wanted to pick but missed the early, small crop. The sweet cherry trees at our US31 market have some cherries on them too so we will be open there for u-pick  while they last. The trees at the US31 market were planted in 2003 and they have not produced much so far but we hope that block bears large crops starting next year.
When there are cracks in the cherries u-pick is a great option because the customer can pick and sort cherries as they go. Commercial cherry canners are not able to use cherries that have a high percent of cracks. So we really are looking forward to getting u-pickers out there, but I want to forewarn customers that it will be more work to get good cherries. On the plus side the small crop and unending rain have created many HUGE beautiful cherries that will taste very very good!
On the tart cherry side of our operation the news is not any better. We have 40 acres of tarts with nothing on the trees. We will not be able to have any u-pick in tarts this year. We will have available our own frozen pitted tarts.
In the big picture we have a good crop of tarts on 2 lease farms so we are not completely blanked. Apricots, peaches, and nectarines, have a full crop, and we will have u-pick, and they will start earlier than normal which should be good. We estimate that we have 65% percent of an apple crop, but that should work out ok because the apple crop in Michigan is less than half, so we expect good prices. We also have a crop of Balaton cherries and demand seems to be up for those. Raspberries are coming in right now too and we will have them throughout the summer and fall.

John