Cherries Are Heating Up

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

The weather is most definitely heating up and so is the cherry crop according to our good friend, BJ Thurlby with NW Cherries.

THURLBY: We finally got out of first gear. When we talk about this early season that we’ve had and again we were originally thinking we might start picking asa early as the 20th of May and then we had some cooler weather and then we had a little bit of rain here several weeks ago, when we finally pushed the go button it was a couple of days later than we anticipated.

He says growers are picking a lot of Bing cherries in the early districts.

THURLBY: What I’ve seen, I’ve been out in the packing sheds here the last two or three days with tour groups, the fruit is really looking good. The key thing we like to see is what kind of opportunity are we going to get for the consumer to come back and buy more fruit, I think we’re going down the right path as an industry right now the fruit looks great. The California deal ran dry quicker than anybody really thought it would and they’ve got just a smidgen of fruit left that they’re shipping.

July 4th has always been the target date for the cherry industry.

THURLBY: By the time we start shipping for Father’s Day which will be in another three or four days here we should be up and running and really be going full blast as an industry. You know it’s not very often we get to talk about Father’s Day promotions and surprisingly there’s a lot of celebration that goes on around that day and the obviously we come out of that for a couple weeks and then we’ve got the Fourth of July holiday coming up.

Again, this won’t be a record crop but just a very nice, easily manageable crop of NW cherries.

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