U-pickers continue to find plenty of Black sweet cherries. The cracks from 2 weeks ago have shriveled and the good cherries have grown so sorting them is not too hard. I expect that we will have blacks sweet cherries available through Thursday at least and maybe into the weekend. It depends on how many u-pickers come out. The beauty of u-pick is that as the diligent pickers remove the nicest, largest, ripest fruit, the remaining fruit has less competition the remaining fruit then sizes and adds sugar too. So people are drawn to the heavily loaded trees for easy picking but the sweeter larger cherries will be found where the cherries are thinner and require more time to fill the pail.
The light sweet cherries are all done. They did not survive the rain well and were full of cracks and defects, so we machine harvested the remaining yellow sweet cherries for marashinos.
Raspberries continue to roll in. A new wave of berries ripens overnight and as the pickers arrive they get the easy ones first and as the day wears on it requires more searching to fill the pint.
The u-pick in Montmorency cherries is in full swing. Most people have us pit them. This will last at least 2 more weeks. We are not machine harvesting Monts yet so we don’t have them already picked yet, but maybe late this week…
We have started hand picking Balatons and they will be available in the markets and for shipping. Our best shipping deal on Balatons is $49.99 for 9 lbs in a styrofoam box shipping included via Priority mail. These will have no stems, have pits in, and not be washed. (they last longer not washed). We do not have u-pick on Balatons as they are grown at a farm that is not close to our farm markets.
The apricots have been very hard to manage for u-pick. The early varieties came in very early then they were gone before the next variety came in so some customers were disappointed to find none available. We have several trees ripening right now and should have plenty available for the weekend but feel free to e-mail or call to pin it down.
Nectarines and Peaches are still at least two weeks off.
Betsy and I take a lap every morning and assess the best places to pick and we like to send pickers to the best picking, (If the picking is easy the customer will pick more!),
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