Soft Fruit and Cherries Getting Started

Soft Fruit and Cherries Getting Started. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

With the beginning of Spring weather here in the northwest it will soon be time to think about the start of the soft fruit and cherry season. BJ Thurlby, President of the Washington Fruit Commission.

THURLBY: We’re starting to see those apricot trees are definitely going into bloom and it depends on where you are at but down in your neck of the woods and down along the Columbia River there are a lot of blooms going on in apricots and cherries are swelling by the day so we’re coming into kind of that critical period where you want to see nice blooms, you want to have warm enough days were the bees will actually leave the hive. You want to see no rain and it’s just one of those things where it’s kind of an exciting time of the year.

It is also a critical time of year where frost is a real threat.

THURLBY: We’ve had a nice winter. This is something we’ve spent a lot of time just trying to analyze because it’s all about crop timing and talking to the rest of the world about what time and when they should be promoting cherries. One of the things that we study is growing degree days and right now the growing degree days are actually ahead of normal for all districts which is good because what that means is there’s a chance we may end up with some volume for the Fourth of July which we haven’t had in the last 5 or 6 years and it’s really a boon for the growers when they get that.

It is also a boon for the retailers as well to have the fruit to sell for the Fourth holiday. More tomorrow.

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