Cherry Varieties Harvesting

Cherry Varieties Harvesting. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Most of us visiting the grocery have seen some wonderful cherries but what you probably see are either deep red or the pale yellow/red Rainier varieties. Most of us assume the red cherries are Bing but BJ Thurlby with Northwest Cherries says there are a lot of different varieties being harvested.

THURLBY: We’re just now coming into a variety of cherries called the Sweetheart. Sweetheart is a late variety and what I’ve seen so far is that the fruit is large, it’s firm, it’s sweet. So it has all the attributes you want to see in your delivered fruit so I’m pretty excited about it and I think that we’re probably going to finish off this season strong based on what I’m seeing in the Sweetheart.

What about other varieties?

THURLBY: It was a good year for Bing. We’re going to be up. We’re going to be up 5 to 6 million boxes of Bing, probably 5. You know the variety Chelan, the early variety jumped back up this year and was close to a million boxes. I think we’re going to see Rainiers be one of the bigger Rainier crops we’ve ever picked from start to finish. We’re thinking probably 1.7 million 15 pound boxes.

Thurlby talks about the kind of feedback they have been getting.

THURLBY: I think the storyline of the year is going to be, wow the people really like the fruit we delivered. Retailers were exceedingly happy because the other nuance that kind of fell into place this year - we were a product that was late but so were all of our competing products

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