Cherries Shaping Up

Cherries Shaping Up. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

BJ Thurlby with NW Cherry Growers has been getting an earful from excited cherry producers. The weekend’s warm weather has been causing the cherry trees to virtually pop.

THURLBY: They say that some warm weather usually tells the tale on the tree so the tree might look like it has a lot of fruit on it then we get some warm weather and what happens is the tree can only accommodate so many cherries and Mother nature knows how many that is and so some of these cherries usually fall off so over the next few weeks were expecting that to happen.

Of course the cherry growers would like to see some continued warm weather throughout the region to let that process happen. Growers got together recently to discuss the industry and the upcoming season.

THURLBY: We met last week through our 5-state northwest cherry grower meeting and basically we had a great group in attendance and we went around the room and we were able to kind of put, by region timing together for this crop and potential volume. Now again this crop is a week late and there’s not a grower that can actually tell you what they’re going to have because none of us really know right now.

As long as Mother Nature cooperates with no surprises like last year’s rain Thurlby says this could be one for the record books.

THURLBY: But we’re looking at we think in the northwest this year between 150 to 165 thousand tons somewhere in that window in terms of this crop which means we’ve got a great crop on the trees. Last year at this period we weren’t sure because our crop was running late as well but we knew we didn’t have great pollination weather and as it turned out we only had 9.7 million boxes.

More tomorrow.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.