The Gamble of Early Summer Fruit

Long ago I wondered why slot machines used cherries as the winning images for hitting the jackpot. It didn’t make sense to me. Maybe a dollar sign, or a star, but cherries?  It seemed odd.  

Yet a gambling analogy is an apt one for the beginning of the cherry harvest and stone fruit season. Cherries tend to be the first stone fruits off the trees in late spring. If a cherry grower has been lucky enough to avoid too much rain, frosts, hot sun, violent hail, or wind, then there is the chance that the nature machine will spin round and come up, well, cherries.  

Cherries are a highly-valued crop but they are also a risky one. They are extremely sensitive to weather and in The FruitGuys 25 years of business, we’ve heard more stories of the perils and challenges of cherry season than its successes.   

The stories farmers are telling us this year are a mixed bag but we are hopeful.  While last year the harvest started early, this year the California harvest is starting this week, which is considered a little late and will run until early June. California’s crop will cross over with the Washington crop of cherries as well. We’re hearing from growers in California that farmers’ crops truly varied this year county-by-county based on the weather of this extraordinarily wet and cold year, after multiple years of severe drought.

Global warming is affecting cherry growing as well. Cherry trees (like all fruit trees) need a certain number of “chill hours,” the number of hours spent below 45 degrees, during the winter. As winters grow warmer, the varieties that need longer periods of chill are struggling. Folks in the fruit world who hybridize and develop new varieties continue to work on low-chill hour cherries (as well as more hardy varieties) to adapt to the changes in climate.  

So for all of you cherry lovers out there (they are one of my favorite fruits), keep your fingers crossed these next few weeks as we see what comes out of the orchards.  Hopefully, it will be coming up cherries. . . .