Cherry Season Approaching

Cherry Season Approaching. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. June is officially here and with a little luck and Mother Nature cooperates we should start to see some cherry harvesting within a couple of weeks. Weekend rain has caused orchardists some grief and helicopters have been flying over numerous cherry orchards trying to blow off some of the excess waters. Gip Redman with the Oregon Cherry Growers says the cherries you see in the stores right now are from California which has their own problems. REDMAN: The problem with California is California has had similar weather running late, a big crop and they're going to push in on top of this with a lot more fruit than they have for some time. Redman says that despite early efforts California has some large sized fruit. REDMAN: It sounds like their northern district or the northern part of their late part I should call it has a big crop and it's overset for the pruning jobs that they did and so I'm suspecting smaller cherries out of California. With our lighter crop, we should have size and so the marketing may not be as affected as if we both had similar size fruit. Rain is the big unknown factor and the forecast for northern California is for a chance of rain the rest of this week. Estimates for the northwest cherry crop is somewhere around the 14.5 million boxes. REDMAN: The old adage big crops get bigger, small crops get smaller. I don't know if I call this a small crop. It is smaller than what it could be or what we really kind of anticipated. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.