August Activities

I have been remiss in getting out the information but here goes.
We have had a fantastic tart cherry year. All of our mature blocks had bountiful crops and quality remained very good throughout. We had made arrangements to have almost all of our Montmorency cherries made into Tart cherry juice concentrate. We shipped cherries to the concentrator as many as they could take and then we began to fill the rooms at our new freezer building to be concentrated later. There were a few bumps in the road but we made it through and we think we now have at least a years supply of concentrate and it looks and tastes excellent. Our season dragged on and on but we finally finished shaking on August 15, about a week later than usual.
The apricots began started to come in during the cool weather and that stretched out our season. The quality has been very good and when the warm weather hit we really had to scramble to get them picked fast enough. We have been selling the wholesale apricots at the Detroit Eastern Market and at the Benton Harbor Fruit Market. On Thursday night we load a truck for Detroit and my oldest son Jack and friend Courtney leave about 8 pm. They arrive at 1am and sell to the independent grocers who frequent the market. They are mostly from very high end stores and markets and will pay for good quality so it has been going very well. Then they pick up some tomatoes that are grown in Southern Michigan for us to sell in our markets. They sleep for an hour or two and then alternate driving home. Also on Thursday night we send a smaller truck to the Benton Harbor Market. That truck has to be on the lot at 5.45am Friday morning as the buyers come though in a hurry and the sale lasts only for an hour or so. My middle son Frank went once leaving here at 1.00 am and last night Jim’s son Jimmy and son-in-law Mark took the load. The truck had a wheel bearing fail and they were stopped 10 miles shy of the sale. We got one of the buyers to help with a pickup and the load is being shuttled and sold as I write this. Jim left with a pickup and car hauler trailer at 6.00am on the 4 hr each way trip to bring them home. The apricots are still available for u-pick through the weekend and the late variety that we are picking now is delicious and beautiful..
Nectarines arrived with a flourish. The hot weather brought them all on at once and we have been hustling trying to stay ahead of them. We like them tree ripened but they get soft so quickly and the soft ones don’t travel even though they taste great. So both markets have great deals on nectarines that are tree ripened and delicious. We have nectarines on the afore mentioned trucks headed to Southern Michigan.
Peaches are in full swing right now. The Red Havens are plentiful and good size too. When we start picking we pick them a little firmer than people want so that we don’t get bruises. We are leaving 1/3 of the trees at M88 for u-pick so the customer can get some tree ripened fruit if they work at it. Because the tree does not ripen all at once you can’t stay in one place and fill your basket. You need to keep moving to find the ripest fruit.
New waves of raspberries are coming in.
Sweet corn has taken forever to ripen and we are now done with the early variety and into the midseason corn which is a little bigger ear and is sweeter too. We will really have a lot of corn available over labor day.
We are really having fun with the vegetables too. Beets, Greens, Zucchini, Pickles and Cukes are coming in, and sunflowers too.
All in all a great harvest for us. I want to thank our customers too.

Looking ahead we will start picking Ginger Gold apples Tuesday August 27. We start picking for the packing house in Sparta, Mi and they are a little too green for our tastes. We will probably have Ginger Gold in our markets by the end of next week. We have started picking Paula Reds and Zestars and will soon have some Sanzas too. These are summer apples that we have in limited supply to sell until the Ginger Golds, Gala, and McIntosh start coming in.