Cherries Off To Good Start

Cherries Off To Good Start. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

It won’t be long now before big, beautiful cherries will be harvested here in the state. Gip Redman, VP in charge of field services for the Oregon Cherry Growers says things are looking pretty good.

REDMAN: I wouldn’t have thought we would have made it through last year as well as we did thinking about tree health after November of 2010 which did a lot of damage but we had probably the perfect season all summer long to help with some healing and it really didn’t show as much as I thought it was going to.

Redman believes that there still may be some remnants of that hard November freeze and he says it’s seldom that you get through a year without stress.

REDMAN: We’ve had a mild winter. We’ve had a mild spring. We’ve had a lot better weather for pollination than we’ve had in the last couple years so everything is stacking up to a good to large crop. You know it’s really too early to say how large but it’s definitely bigger than last year and last year was the second largest cherry crop we’ve had.

Of course Mother Nature will have the final say on that but the big question out there is whether it might be as large a crop as 2009.

REDMAN: I’m just not quite ready to make any of those statements yet. The bee activity was fantastic. They worked in some weather this year that normally they don’t.

Tomorrow we’ll talk more with Gip Redman about pollination and fruit size.

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