John’s comments, Really nice looking cherry crop

The sweet cherries have finally begun to turn color and we can get excited about the upcoming sweet cherry season. The crows are getting in the act and we have been out shooing them away. I am anxious to get upick sweets underway. We trimmed the sweet cherry trees very hard this year. We cut away tall branches in the tops and over the center so that more sun would get to lower branches. More sun gets us larger sweeter cherries. The biggest sweetest sweet cherries are grown from buds on the base of last years new wood, followed by spurs on wood from two years ago. When we trim a tree hard it will respond with more new growth this year. Then next year we will have more basal buds with big cherries and in two years we will have more spurs with big cherries. It is my hope that upick customers will see these large cherries and fill up their buckets.

The tart cherry crop is also coming along nicely. They are still several weeks away. We are seeing lots of fruit in the trees throughout the many blocks of tart cherries. The large crop means that we can economically send most of our production to be made into tart cherry juice concentrate, and still have plenty available for upick and for pitting and freezing. Dr Oz and others have done a nice job of getting the word out on the health benefits of tart cherry juice concentrate and we will need to have plenty available for sales year round.  We will have the pitter going this year and if you want to pick your own cherries we will be able to pit them for you.

Our highly skilled work crew finished trimming and went right to thinning. Every peach, apricot, nectarine, and apple tree is gone over. They go over every branch and thin out the small fruit so that we can have big and sweet fruit at harvest time. We did the stone fruit first and now are in the apples. Every cluster is thinned to just one large apple. We do this to insure large fruit and it also keeps the tree growing vigorously so that we have return bloom next year.

It looks like we will have sweets about July 12, but the tart cherries look like they won’t get started until about July 18th or so. Be sure to call and check on fruit development before you drive too far. It is really hard to guess if it will warm up enough to get some sugar and color in these cherries sooner or later.

One big challenge with the cool weather this year was getting the veggies planted. We were 2 weeks late planting pumpkins, squash, cukes and pickles but we got them in and with all the rain they have started to grow better that the last few years. However, I couldn’t get out with the sweet corn planter for the last 10 days so I didn’t get as much sweet corn planted as I wanted to. Probably we have plenty for the main season but it will run out in September. It seems that sweet corn planted after the solstice doesn’t always grow very well. I will get in a half acre to see if we can grow some late season sweet corn but I am not confident.
Raspberries are coming in about a week. They look great. I forgot to mow one row so that it would have a large crop of fall berries but I think we will have plenty.
John